In the early 1970s, the great Italian poet, philosopher and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom) brought to the screen a trio of masterpieces of premodern world literature - Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and The Thousand and One Nights (often known as The Arabian Nights) - and in doing so created his most uninhibited and extravagant work, which he titles his Trilogy of Life. In this brazen and bawdy triptych, the director set out to challenge consumer capitalism and celebrate the uncorrupted human body while commenting on contemporary sexual and religious mores and hypocrisies. His scatological humour and rough-hewn sensuality leave all modern standards of decency behind; these are physical, provocative, and wildly entertaining films, all extraordinarily designed by Dante Ferretti (Hugo) and featuring evocative music by Ennio Morricone.

Special features:

• Presented in High Definition
• Includes both Italian-language and English-language versions of all three films
• Notes for an African Oresteia (1970, 73 mins): Pasolini s visual notes for an unrealised film project
• Pasolini and the Italian Genre Film (2009, 37 mins)
• Deleted scenes (1974, 21 mins): deleted scenes from Pasolini's Arabian Nights
• Original trailers for all three films
• Fully illustrated booklet with essays, reviews and biographies
• Other extras TBC