Shakespeare’s Othello does not need to be retold. It only needs to be reread exactly as it was written, with only the power of dialect to bring it back to the present. Iago, Othello, Desdemona are unfortunately still among us. The chronicle through a great classic. Set in the early 2000s, a timeless story in which good and evil mingle in a maelstrom of deceit, betrayal and mad jealousy.
The idea to work on Shakespeare’s Othello was born fifteen years ago from an article read in a newspaper. A man, blinded by insane jealousy, kills his wife and then commits suicide. It is both the synopsis of one of the most famous plays in the world and a sad chronicle of our times.
From there began a long research to think of a contemporary adaptation that would be as respectful of the original as possible. From comparing the many Italian translations of the tragedy, made in different eras, the conviction matured that to restore Shakespeare’s ‘word’, the dialect (Roman and Neapolitan) was paradoxically the closest to represent the force of that language. A translation work that lasted many years and allowed me to film Othello without ‘touching’ the text which was, except for the necessary cuts, fully reported.
Racism, violence, social envy, male chauvinism, feminicide, an investigation of evil of staggering modernity for a play that is more than 400 years old.
Encapsulated in Iago’s sentence that most of all suggests the depth of the psychological analysis that this text operates on its characters and still on us investigating in our contradictions. And which gives this film its title. “I am not what I am.”
