A lovely slave girl selects a young man to be her new owner in ancient Arabia, but she is stolen and they must hunt for each other. Love, travel, and the quirks of fate are all conveyed inside stories.
Pier Paolo Pasolini directed the 1974 Italian film Arabian Nights. The original Italian title is Il fiore delle mille e una notte, which translates as The Flower of a Thousand and One Nights.
The film is based on the Arabic anthology One Thousand and One Nights, often known as the Arabian Nights. It completes Pasolini’s “Life Trilogy,” which began with The Decameron and continued with The Canterbury Tales. Pasolini discovered young Franco Merli for the role of the protagonist. The film is an adaptation of numerous stories from the original collection, although they are presented out of sequence and without the framing plot with Scheherazade, Dunyazad, and King Shahriyar.
The picture is filled with nudity, sex, and slapstick humor.
Pasolini sought to produce an Arabian Nights picture based on his “remember of it as a youngster” with this film. Pasolini re-read the 1001 Nights with a more critical eye in preparation for the film, selecting only the stories he thought were the most ‘beautiful.’