Roberta the Experimenter

I discovered Roberta Torre only a little while ago and since then I have heard her compared to several famous male directors - Fellini, Almodovar … It occurred to me that she may not have found her own voice as an auteur yet. BUT on her way to finding it she is experimenting, breaking boundaries and learning valuable lessons from trials other directors may not have braved.

Torre began as a documentary film maker and "clearly, she has not renounced her background". For her version of the Romeo and Juliet story, "South Side Story" (a play off of 'West Side Story') she chose not to use professional actors. In her take, Torre tells the love story between a Nigerian immigrant and a native Sicilian and uses this new take to outline the hardships of integration. For her actors, the director sought out … African girls at night, while they were on the streets working." Apparently during the filming, one was even deported. However, Torre doesn't regret the self-imposed challenge of working with these women. She has said that she has a better understanding of humanity through these girls. 

It is that dedication to honest and barrier-pushing work that draws me to Torre. Whenever you come across an article about Torre, it is noted that she was the first director to ever make a musical about the mafia. This is something unexpected, edgy and difficult to pull off in both an artistic and entertaining manner. According to most critics, she did so. Despite controversy surrounding the nature of her experimental work, Torre refuses to compromise. Footage for her film I back mai dati "was judged as being too crude," the director told one reporter. She continued, "I was forced to cut and revise. So, to be independent, I decided to found my own production house, 'Rosettafilm'.

The film of hers I saw,  Lost Kisses, is a surreal satire about a 14 year old girl who claims that a beheaded statue of the Madonna told her in her dreams where to find the missing piece of the statue. It's  a humble and quirky movie with a focus on humour and whimsical, stylized bits that are woven in with the more realistic scenes of the movie. This reminds me of what feminist and Professor of Modern Art told ARTnews interviewer Barbara McAdam:

"I don’t think the work all came out of the vagina or anything like that ...  These women wondered, How am I going to place myself in relation to the art language of today? ... the work could be made out of something ephemeral; that it was going to be antigeometric in a sense ...  that it might be vulnerable and subject to disappearance—all of which reads as somehow feminine" (1).

Although here, the professor is speaking about abstract art, the idea of focusing on something that is ephemeral and antigeometric rather than thinking about the pressures of permanency and grandeur rings true to Torre's work. She may not be considered an auteur yet but Torre certainly has the passion, courage and commitment to integrity that it takes to become one.

A clip from Lost Kisses, however not one that shows its whimsical and surreal side ...

Works Cited
"Open Roads: New Italian Cinema". Film-Forward.Com, June 1-8, 2011. Web. April 2012.

Azzolini, Mauro. "Roberta Torre Strikes Again". Best of Sicily Magazine. 2001. Web. April 2012.

Felletti, Francesca. "Roberta Torre". L'Uomo Vogue. March 2011. Web. April 2012.

MacAdam, Barbara A. "Where the Great Women Artists Are Now". ARTnews Online Magazine.  February 01 2007. Web. April 2012.