Sally Potter was live in conversation at The Garden Cinema with Dr. Alice Pember to discuss her 1993 film Orlando, starring Tilda Swinton.

The director joined us for a weekend retrospective of her films and music in anticipation of the release of Sally’s debut album, Pink Bikini, a semi-autobiographical collection of songs about growing up female in London in the 1960s, as a young rebel and activist.

Orlando is a story of the quest for love, and it is also an ironic dance through English history. Addressing contemporary concerns about gender and identity, the film is remarkably true to the spirit of Virginia Woolf, but it also skilfully adapts the original story to give it a striking, cinematic form. The screenplay is a standard text taught in film schools as a radical and successful adaptation of a classic work. Orlando is a bold, unsentimental re-working of Virginia Woolf’s classic novel in which an innocent aristocrat journeys through 400 years of English history first as a man, then as a woman.