Pier Paolo Pasolini: An Italian Journey

Arabian Nights (Italian: Il fiore delle Mille e una notte, lit. 'The Flower of the One Thousand and One Nights') is a 1974 erotic fantasy comedy anthology film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The film is an adaptation of the ancient Arabic anthology One Thousand and One Nights, also known as The Arabian Nights. It is mostly based on the tale Ali Shar and Zumurrud. It is the last of Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life", which began with The Decameron and continued with The Canterbury Tales. The lead was played by young Franco Merli who was discovered for this film by Pasolini. The film is an adaptation of several stories within the original collection but they are presented out of order and without the Scheherazade, Dunyazad and King Shahriyar frame story. The film contains nudity, sex, poetry, and slapstick humor. It preserves the eroticism and the story within a story structure of Arabian Nights and has been called "perhaps the best and certainly the most intelligent" of Arabian Nights film adaptations. With this film, Pasolini intended to make a film of Arabian Nights based on his 'memory of it as a boy'. In preparation for the film, Pasolini re-read the 1001 Nights with a more critical lens and chose only the stories that he felt were the most 'beautiful'.