Last year The Bard’s oft-retold love tragedy Romeo and Juliet received a well-deserved queer reimagining in the short film Still a Rose from Hazart . After making last summer’s LGBT film festival rounds, the film, starring Pretty Little Liars’ Troian Bellisario, is now available on iTunes and Vimeo for $2.99.
In Still a Rose, Troian stars as one Juliet in the famous balcony scene, while Will Branske portrays the film's other Juliet. Meanwhile, Tinuke Oyefule and Brandon Crowder play the two Romeos, making for a series of same and opposite sex pairings that upend gender and sexuality.
Last year we spoke with Troian, whose passion for Shakespeare and equality know no bounds.
“To me, making it a woman and a woman or making it a man and a man within a very wealthy family that brought back that there are a lot of places where that would be hidden,” Troian told us about interchanging gender and sexuality in the film. “The danger became immediately real again. Suddenly you look at these two lovers and you say, ‘I know this story. I love this story.’ And it suddenly doesn’t seem fair that just because they’re now a same-sex couple…”
(RELATED: Pretty Little Liars' Troian Bellisario Plays a Queer, Modern Juliet for the Ages)
The excellent tagline for the film, from Hazart, is “The greatest love story ever told reimagined through the lens of equal love.”
If Hazart sounds familiar it’s because it’s the same film duo that brought us Troian and her Pretty Little Liars' costar Shay Mitchell rolling around in bed sheets with tousled hair in Immediately Afterlife. That was not a queer-themed short per se, but there’s probably room for that sort of interpretation. Still, Troian did appear in Head and the Heart’s video for “Another Story,”which depicts tragic love between two young women in the oppressive environment of the ‘50s/early /60s.
Watch the trailer here for Still a Rose below:
