Orlando

Director: Sally Potter

1992 / 94min / DCP

Potter’s utterly sui generis gender-bender period piece features Tilda Swinton as an immortal nobleman who inherits his parents’ house back in 1600 from a dying Queen Elizabeth I on the condition that he “not fade,” weathers a catastrophic affair with a Russian princess and then, while serving as ambassador to Constantinople and approaching his 200th birthday, is shocked one day to awake and find himself a woman, unable to lay hold on her property, which she struggles to do through passing centuries, right up to the then-present-day 1990s. Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel but, rather than following it to the letter, boldly taking liberties with the text, a cinematic equivalent of Woolf’s own searching literary inventions. A new restoration, screening with Potter’s 2022 short film Look at Me, making its US theatrical debut.

With Sally Potter in-person for Q&A on 10/7, 6:15p & 10/9, 6:30p