Shakespeare in Vucciria : Fair Verona in Roberta Torre's Sud Side Stori

The essay analyses Roberta Torre''s "Sud Side Stori" (2000), a film loosely inspired by "Romeo and Juliet", and explores the strategies through which it poses a challenge to the globilized version of Shakespeare that has been promoted by the film industry over the past few decades. Although Roberta Torre nods at and even quotes the Shakespearean films produced and distributed by the Hollywood majors, she ultimately treats her subject with a richly determined local distinctiveness, and with her aesthetics of miscegenation and corporeality she effectively restores the materiality of the local within the disembodied, decontextualized grammar of contemporary film adaptations of Shakespeare with their commodified representations of Italy.