“L’Isola di Medea” -Film screening and conversation with actor Ninetto Davoli

Ninetto Davoli

On the 50th anniversary of the death of
Pier Paolo Pasolini

for the first time at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York

in conversation with the audience after the screening of:

The Island of Medea

In videoconference, the film’s director and screenwriter
Sergio Naitza

Moderator, Claudio Pagliara
Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York

On the 50th anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s death (November 2, 1975 – November 2, 2025), the Italian Cultural Institute in New York will host a special guest, Ninetto Davoli. After a screening of Sergio Naitza’s film L’Isola di Medea (90”), Pasolini’s lifelong friend will converse with the audience and the film’s director, connected via video conference. Claudio Pagliara, director of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, will moderate the event.

Ninetto Davoli was born in San Pietro a Maida (Catanzaro) on October 11, 1948. Having moved to Rome as a teenager, he was discovered by Pasolini who, after giving him a cameo in the film The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), chose him as a co-star, alongside Totò in the film Hawks and the Sparrows (1966) and, subsequently, in the episodes: The Earth Seen from the Moon (1967) and What Are Clouds? (1968). Thus began a long professional and sentimental partnership destined to end only with the death of the poet and director. It was Davoli himself who identified Pier Paolo Pasolini’s body on the morning of November 2, 1975, after the director’s assassination. Davoli made a total of nine films with Pasolini, the last of which was The Flower of the Thousand and One Nights (1974).

The film The Island of Medea recounts the impossible love between Pasolini and Maria Callas, who first met in 1969 on the set of Medea. Naitza offers testimonies from those who were on set: Oscar-winning costume designers Piero Tosi and Gabriella Pescucci; actor Giuseppe Gentile, chosen by Pasolini for the role of Jason and at the time an Olympic triple jump champion; actress Piera Degli Esposti, who made her debut in Medea in the role of the handmaid; and writer Dacia Maraini, who traveled extensively to Africa with Pasolini, Moravia, and Callas. The film’s narrator is Ninetto Davoli himself.

The friendship between Pasolini and Callas lasted for several seasons. Both died at the age of 53—Pasolini in 1975, Maria Callas in 1977—tragically surprising the world with their untimely deaths.