Oedipus Rex (Edipo re) is a 1967 Italian film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

[1] Pasolini adapted the screenplay from the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex written by Sophocles in 428 BC.

The father is motivated by jealousy, and believes the child will take away the love of his wife and send him back into the void.

The soldier takes the baby into the desert to be abandoned, at which point the film's setting changes to the ancient world of Greece.

He asks his parents to visit the Oracle of Delphi in order to find out the opinions of the god Apollo.

After an unspecified period, Oedipus comes across roving bands of displaced people fleeing the Sphinx that has terrorized the country of Thebes.

Creon returns and tells him that for the plague to end, King Laius' killer must be brought to justice.

Oedipus banishes him from the city believing that his brother-in-law Creon put him up to it in order to steal the throne.

Oedipus realizes with horror that the Oracle's prophecy has been fulfilled and that Jocasta and Laius were his birth parents.

The film's style is intentionally ahistorical and uses various cultural motifs to create an other worldly environment.

[2] Pasolini begins and ends the film in 1920s Italy in what he calls an act of Freudian Sublimation.

Oedipus plays the traditional Japanese gagaku theme on his pipe and follows it with a Russian folk song about resistance.

Since Accattone, Pasolini had planned and hinted at making a film about the Oedipus Complex and its certain "autobiographical anxiety".

The film can be seen as a sharp rebuke of Pasolini's own father and the militaristic, bourgeois Italy he had born into.

Writing on the matter he said "I gave up the idea of doing it there, but in recompense I found some folk-tunes which I liked a lot because they are extremely ambiguous: they are half-way between Slavic, Greek and Arab songs, they are indefinable: it is unlikely that anyone who didn't have specialized knowledge could locate them; they are a bit outside history […] I wanted music which was a-historical, a-temporal".

Otto Stransky's tango In Santa Lucia is played in the opening scene set in the 1920s era.

At the end of the film, Oedipus plays both the Gagaku and the resistance song Funeral March of 1905 on his flute.

The entire second part of the film is faithfully adapted from Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex.