Al Pacino turns Oscar Wilde's one-act play into a stage-bound screen experiment, shot over just five days and paired with a documentary about the making of the same production.
What is Salomé about?
Salomé restages Wilde's telling of the biblical story of Herod's stepdaughter, whose dance for her stepfather earns her a single wish and sets a prophet's fate in motion. Pacino directs and appears in the film, staging Wilde's dialogue with a small ensemble rather than the sprawling sets of a conventional costume drama. The project sits alongside Wilde Salomé, a companion documentary that was shown at the Venice Film Festival and captures the production coming together; the two were conceived as a matched pair rather than a single standalone feature.
About the cast
Jessica Chastain, Kevin Anderson, Roxanne Hart and Joe Roseto join Pacino in front of the camera, with Pacino directing from behind it as well.
Context & significance
Shot in 2011 over a five-day window, Salomé is one of Pacino's directing experiments — a chamber-piece approach to a text he had wanted to bring to the screen for years. It reached audiences only gradually rather than through a conventional theatrical release, and its closest companion piece is the documentary that filmed the production itself, giving viewers a rare look at how a stage text this old gets reworked for camera. The play's source material, Wilde's Salomé, has been adapted many times on stage and screen since it was first published, and Pacino's version leans on performance and language over spectacle. The play itself has drawn film and stage directors for over a century because its short length and single setting make it well suited to an intense, actor-focused staging rather than a large production. Pacino's version keeps that scale intact, favoring long stretches of dialogue over cutaways, which is part of why it reads more like a filmed play than a conventional period feature.
Watching Salomé on Ktime
Salomé is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, with a free account login; the platform's Farsi interface makes the play's dense, quotable dialogue easy to follow for Persian-speaking audiences.