PETROLIO: THE LAST TESTAMENT OF PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

When Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered on November 2, 1975, on a beach in Ostia, a suburb of Rome, Italy’s most famous and controversial artist left behind an unfinished manuscript: Petrolio. “My life’s work,” said the filmmaker and writer, who was Catholic, gay, and a Marxist. More than just a novel, this text, with its revolutionary form represents the culmination of his thought, his true testament.

All of Pasolini’s obsessions converge here. His childhood in Friuli, where, amid a peasant culture still untouched by modernity, he discovered what he called the “sacred.” His arrival in Rome in the 1950s, where he found that same authenticity among the marginalized and the ragazzi di vita. Then came the upheaval brought about by the Italian economic miracle: consumerist standardization destroyed dialects, landscapes, bodies, and even the spirit of the common people that he had loved so dearly.

This documentary follows the writing of Petrolio during the last four years of Pasolini’s life. When Ninetto Davoli, the love of his life, chooses a bourgeois existence with another woman, the poet sees his last refuge crumble. Even sexuality, that vital and revolutionary force, is now caught up in the norm. As his inner rage grows, his book transforms into a dizzying investigation into the links between economic power, the political violence of the “Years of Lead,” and the disappearance of the sacred, what he calls “cultural genocide.” Through his fictional alter ego, Carlo, an engineer at ENI, the Italian oil giant, Pasolini dissects a world where capitalism is no longer content merely to rule over people: it colonizes their bodies as much as their consciences.

As the writing progresses, Petrolio becomes more fragmentary, darker, and more prophetic. Pasolini was convinced he was approaching a dangerous truth. His assassination, a few months before the book’s completion, remains a mystery to this day. But Petrolio seems to hold clues to shedding light on the tragic fate of a man who, until his last breath, was locked in a perpetual struggle with his time.