Medea

“It's a movie about a woman who beheads her brother, stabs her children, and sends her lover's wife up in flames. For Maria Callas, it's a natural.”

Medea (Maria Callas) comes from a barbarian land, and in the Greek world she has made her home, she is a foreigner, a woman with powers the Greeks do not trust. Pier Paolo Pasolini, working from Euripides, stages her story as ritual and myth, and Callas, in her only film role, plays her in long, wordless stares. When her husband Giasone (Giuseppe Gentile) takes up with another woman, Medea has to decide how much of herself she will give up to answer him.