In her meditative film essay, director Cathy Lee Crane has crafted a conceptual biography of one of cinema’s most celebrated trangressors, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Focusing on the year leading up to his brutal murder at the hands of a young rent boy in 1975, Crane weaves extracts of his late writings with a combination of archive material and inventively staged recreations, crafting an enigmatic and experimental portrait of an endlessly fascinating artist. Structured in ten parts that each take their name from the front page articles that he published in the months leading to his death, Pasolini’s Last Words is a work of striking formal invention, that at once celebrates Pasolini not only as a filmmaker, but also as a poet, a polemicist and an activist. Michael Blyth for BFI
