In the early 1970s, the great Italian 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, the Trilogy of Life.
The second part of the trilogy, The Canterbury Tales plunges with gusto into Chaucer's dark and bawdy stories, which celebrate almost every conceivable sexual act with a rich, earthy humour.
Pasolini himself has a cameo appearance in this playful and provocative film, presented here in a new restored transfer from the original negative.
