Translated by the director himself from Sophocles’ play, supplemented with a prologue and epilogue and set in modern times, Pasolini’s dreamlike version of Oedipus Rex tells the classic story of a young man who unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother, despite warning. "The relationship of hatred and love between father and son is what produces history," wrote Pasolini, and it is clear that the story has autobiographical significance for the director (made explicit in the prologue, when the army-officer father expresses jealousy of his own baby). Filmed in and around a fifteenth-century adobe city in the Moroccan desert, Pasolini’s adaptation enhances the timelessness of the story with a musical track that mixes Roman songs, ancient Japanese melodies, Mozart, and works by Pasolini himself.