Orlando

Orlando is at its heart a story of loss—the loss of time as it passes—a meditation on the impermanence of love, power, and politics. I simply carried that logic through to include Orlando’s loss of property and status in the 20^th century. Whilst the loss of property in the story is a symptom of the second class status of women, there is also an aspect which is worthy of celebration: the loss of privilege and status based on an outdated English class system.

Finally, the ending of the film needed to be brought into the present in order to remain true to Virginia Woolf’s use of real-time at the end of the novel (where the story finishes just as she puts down her pen to finish the book). Coming up to the present day meant acknowledging some key events of the 20^th century--the two world wars, the electronic revolution—the contraction of space through time reinvented by speed. But the film ends somewhere between heaven and earth in a place of ecstatic communion with the present moment.

-Sally Potter on her adaptation of Woolf's novel