£6.00
(£4.50 conc.)
Doors 2:00pm
Film 2:30pm
A film and book club for avid readers and Deptford cinephiles. Every second Sunday afternoon of the month, we will meet up to watch a film adaptation of a book or a writer’s biopic.
dir. Sally Potter
year. 1992
country. UK
run-time. 89min
starring. Tilda Swinton, Billy Zane, Lothaire Bluteau, Quentin Crisp, Charlotte Valandrey, Heathcote Williams
rating. PG
ORLANDO (1992)
a film directed by Sally Potter
based on the novel
ORLANDO: A BIOGRAPHY by Virginia Woolf
In April, Deptford Cinema’s Film and Book Club will focus on a collaboration between two women auteurs: film director Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), which is freely adapted from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928), the fictional memoir of her friend and lover Vita Sackville West.
Starring Tilda Swinton in her break-out role, this cross-temporal, cross-gender, and cross-genre period drama follows the eponymous protagonist through the ages, from the Elizabethan era to the 1990s, and from manhood to womanhood.
Almost thirty years on, Sally Potter’s film feels timely, prompting questions around gender ambiguity, sexual identity and queerness. Politically engaged and aesthetically daring - with its central character ‘breaking the fourth wall’ to reflect Woolf’s convention of addressing her readers directly - Orlando is a highly-stylised and visually-ravishing adaptation, unsurprisingly nominated for an Academy Award for Sally Powell’s costume design.
We are pleased to welcome three speakers to Deptford Cinema for the post-film discussion of Orlando:
Jessica Palmarozza is a producer for the writer and director Sally Potter at Adventure Pictures. She also makes films with her company, Kangaroo Films.
Alice Pember is a PhD researcher at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research examines girlhood and dance in contemporary cinema. She co-edits the Oxford Queer Studies Network blog.
Jenni Råback is a PhD candidate and teaching associate at Queen Mary University of London and her thesis explores the sister relationship of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.
Due to unforeseen circumstance, the book club meet-up at 7.30pm on Wednesday 10th April in the Dog and Bell pub has been cancelled. Apologies for any inconvenience. However, there will be plenty of opportunity for discussion post-screening on Sunday.
“...could well become a classic of a very special kind, not mainstream perhaps, but a model for independent film makers who follow their own irrational muses, sometimes to unmourned obscurity, occasionally to glory.”
“Hip, sexy and wickedly funny.”
