To mark the premiere of the new LAC production of *The Oresteia*, directed by Carmelo Rifici, the festival presents Pier Paolo Pasolini’s documentary film *Notes for an African Oresteia*, one of the Italian director’s most complex works, born from the idea of transposing Aeschylus’s tragedy to the African continent.
Notes for an African *Oresteia*
Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1970
1h05’
Original version
Reservations are required
Italian
Notes for an African *Oresteia*
Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1970
1h05’
Original version
Reservations are required
Italian
Inspired by a trip he took to Africa—visiting Uganda, Tanzania, and other countries on the continent—Pier Paolo Pasolini created *Notes for an African Oresteia* in 1970, a film-essay, research journal, and political reflection that took shape as an unfinished project: the idea of transposing Aeschylus’s *Oresteia* to contemporary Africa.
More than an adaptation, the film is an open laboratory of thought. Pasolini films faces, landscapes, cities, rituals, and everyday gestures, questioning the possibility of identifying in postcolonial Africa a historical and symbolic equivalent of the transition depicted in the Greek tragedy: the shift from archaic justice to the birth of democracy.
Through documentary footage, location scouting, visual notes, and moments of discussion—notably the exchange with some African students at Rome’s “La Sapienza” University who challenge his very hypotheses —the director constructs one of his most complex and multi-layered works, suspended between cinema, anthropology, politics, and myth.
A fascinating and thought-provoking work, *Notes for an African Oresteia* offers no definitive answers but continues to challenge the viewer to reflect on the relationships between cultures, the representation of the “other,” and the possibility of fostering a dialogue between past and present.
Appunti per un’Orestiade africana
Estratto
As part of the festival
Parallel Visions
Edited by
Nicola Fiori
In collaboration with
JFC Cinema – IRIDE Lugano
Partner principale LAC edu
