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.
Tilda Swinton, in one of her signature roles as the titular, heads an eccentric cast encompassing such diverse figures as Billy Zane and Quentin Crisp. It's also the film which saw Sally Potter emerge from an avant-garde notoriety into mainstream recognition, with a lavishly designed spectacle that earned numerous awards and two Oscar nominations.
