Selected by Anna Luif
Director of Les Histoires d'amour de Liv S.​​​​​​​

For Love Meetings, Pasolini travelled around Italy and asked Italians questions about love. He asked students about the equality between men and women, he asked soldiers about being a Don Giovanni or a family man, he asked farmers about now and the past, he asked poor and rich people in the streets and on the beaches of Veneto, Calabria, Tuscany, etc. about divorce, homosexuality, sadism and masochism and he asked prostitutes about the Lex Merlin (a law that declared brothels illegal in 1958). In beautiful black and white frames, we see the well-dressed Pasolini – most of the time from behind – with a microphone in his hand in the middle of large groups of people. We hear his relentless voice asking and repeating simple questions like “Do you think marriage solves all sexual problems?” and then we watch: the faces of all types of people (young, old, rich, poor, beautiful, ugly, confident, shy) trying to answer Pasolini’s questions. The longer I watch this highly entertaining and extremely interesting period document, I ask myself how Pasolini must have felt amongst the Italian people answering to almost all his questions with answers that went against his own values and convictions. And I imagine how lonely Pasolini must have felt. A man, who in his films and writings treated themes like the love and sexuality between mother and son, the killing of one's own child, violence, purity and religion, etc. And it always strikes me how extremely brave this artist has been and how much we (I) can still learn from him.