SALÒ, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM

Including Introduction, Screening and Discussion

Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy|France, 1975, 117´
Language: Italian with English subtitles
Age Restriction: 15+
Tickets available online or at the door.
Doors open 18:20
Introduction 18:45
Showtime 19:00
Discussion after the film, approx. 21:00

Set in the final months of the Republic of Salò – the Nazi-backed puppet state that Mussolini governed from Northern Italy between 1943 and 1945 – the film follows four powerful figures: the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate, and the President. Together, they represent the intertwined pillars of fascist authority: aristocracy, clergy, judiciary, and finance.

The four men orchestrate the abduction of a group of young men and women, whom they imprison in a secluded villa. Over the course of several months, the captives are subjected to an escalating regime of degradation, as the libertines exercise their absolute dominion over their victims’ bodies and minds. The narrative is structured in four sections inspired by Dante’s Inferno, each circle descending further into depravity.

Salò is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final film. He was murdered in November 1975, just weeks before its release, under circumstances that remain disputed and deeply troubling to this day. The film is loosely adapted from the Marquis de Sade’s 18th-century novel, but Pasolini’s transposition to Fascist Italy transforms it into something far beyond a literary adaptation: it becomes a searing, uncompromising allegory of political power and the commodification of human beings.

The film is notorious, and rightly so, for the extremity of what it depicts. It has been banned, censored, and condemned in numerous countries. Yet to dismiss it as mere provocation is to miss its intellectual core. Pasolini was a poet, a novelist, a philosopher, and a polemicist; in Salò, he brings all of these faculties to bear on the question of what happens when power becomes absolute and the human body is reduced to an object of consumption.