Its original Italian title is Il fiore delle mille e una notte, which means The Flower of the One Thousand and One Nights.

[2] The main story concerns an innocent young man, Nur-e-Din (Franco Merli), who comes to fall in love with a beautiful slave girl, Zumurrud (Ines Pellegrini), who selected him as her master.

Various other travellers recount their own tragic and romantic experiences, including a young man who becomes enraptured by a mysterious woman on his wedding day, and the prince Shazaman (Alberto Argentino), who wants to free a woman from a demon (Franco Citti) and for whom two women sacrifice their lives.

Around this time, Ninetto Davoli, who was bisexual and involved with Pier Paolo Pasolini, left him to marry a woman.

Pasolini references this by having his story be the one about the man who is instructed on how to woo a woman by a girl who happens to be his fiancé and who dies of a broken heart.

Zummurrud's bride is played by the thirteen year son of an Iranian hotel owner who lived near Imam mosque.

[6] Filming took place in Iran, north and south Yemen, the deserts of Eritrea and Ethiopia, and Nepal.

In part of the love scene between the girl prisoner of the demon and Prince Shahzaman, Barbara Grandi, who was thirteen during filming, was replaced by an older body double.

The Shah Mosque is the place of the wedding feast, where Zummurrud takes revenge on her former captors and where she sees Nur-ed-Din eating at the end of the film.

The balcony of Ālī Qāpū Palace in Esfahan can be seen as a stage for the wedding celebrations and the throne room of Chehel Sotoun became the King's bedroom.

[10] The Music Hall of Ālī Qāpū doubled as the underground chamber where Prince Shahzmah finds a girl who is held prisoner by a demon.

Most of the score was composed by Ennio Morricone and intentionally keeps away from traditional music unlike the first two films of the Trilogy of Life.

In the intermezzo, four people of different faiths each believe they have killed a hunchback and tell the Sultan stories to calm his anger.

The Christian matchmaker, Muslim chef, Jewish doctor and Chinese tailor each tell their story and avoid the death sentence.

The most famous shot of the film, where Aziz shoots an arrow laden with a dildo into the vagina of Budur is not in this script.

Most of the original script is redone with Nur-ed-Din and Zummurrud as the main narrative and some stories are inserted in different ways to reflect this.

The same as with The Canterbury Tales which also featured international actors, this movie was shot with silent Arriflex 35 mm cameras and was dubbed into Italian in post-production.

[5] Pasolini shot a couple scenes that were later discarded from the final film; these can be seen on the Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray release.

Whereas the previous two were highly critical of the church and clergy, Islam plays very little into this film (though in a deleted scene, Nur-ed-Din's father scolds him for drinking which is prohibited in the Koran).

Allah's name is invoked twice in the entire film and none of the characters are seen going to mosque or performing any religious acts of any kind.

Open sexuality is a very important topic in this film and this is displayed in the Sium story that Zummurrud tells near the beginning.

Though earlier translators of the source material (notably Galland) had tried to tone it down, the physical and erotic essence of the stories is quite abundant in these tales.

The poet Sium takes three boys to his tent early in the film and in the Muslim society which is very segregated by gender, homoeroticism thrives throughout.

This is in much stark contrast to the previous film The Canterbury Tales, which included an elaborate scene of a homosexual being burned alive at the stake, while the clergy look on smiling.

Whereas in the other films, Pasolini himself serves as the one to bind the stories all together (a disciple of Giotto and Geoffrey Chaucer respectively) there is no equivalent character here.

[citation needed] The first painter's drunken foolishness causes the death of two women, the captive princess and the Asian king's daughter Abriza.

He is told by the captive child underground that he is the one who will kill him but foolishly believes he can conquer fate and stays with him rather than leave.

Arabian Nights, and The Trilogy of Life in general, were wildly popular though Pasolini himself turned against the series after their release.

Ironically, the funds for the preview were done with the aim of making a documentary in support of the city which would have been beneficial to the local government.

The second level of his polemic was aimed at the leftists who criticized his Trilogy of Life for not "adhering to a specific political agenda right down to the letter".