“Giovanni Boccaccio's 14th century classic Decameron is a collection of 100 bawdy tales dealing with human sexuality, artistic creation, and what can be seen today with a Marxist perspective as proletarian uprising. Pier Paolo Pasolini has fashioned the novel into a collection of eleven sketches that is simultaneously erotic (with a large emphasis on both male and female nudity), comic, and autobiographical. The cast features Pasolini himself in the role of Giotto, the artist, (plus Franco Citti (Accattone, Oedipus Rex), Ninetto Davoli (The Hawks and the Sparrows)) and forty nonprofessional actors. Pasolini used nonprofessionals because he was fed up with traditional cinema's ‘false language of realism'.... By acknowledging the artifice of movies, Pasolini has made a film that is joyous, theatrical and liberated.” David Schwartz, Film Folio