“Pasolini’s dazzling debut in cinema, Accattone is the story of a thief from the Roman borgate, steeped in the sub-proletarian reality that the writer, upon coming to Rome in the 1950s, had described with passion in his novels. Not a hint of neo-realism. Pasolini ‘did not take the actors from life, but life from the actors’ wrote Amelio with excellent intuition, ‘so that the story of their existence would be told by someone who loves them, not by someone who uses them’ (…). The technical limitations are transformed, by the power of culture, into simple, pure almost hieratic images, which aspire to a Dreyerian essentiality. A sober language, set to sacral music, which merge into poetry that can stand up to the tragic reality of the Roman borgate”. (Gianni Volpi)