Virginia Film Festival

30th Anniversary Screening | 30th Anniversary Celebration of Sony Pictures Classics

Sally Potter’s bold re-working of Virginia Woolf’s classic novel endures as a remarkable love story and an incisive tour through English history, while deftly addressing issues gender and identity. Shortly before the death of Elizabeth I, an innocent aristocrat, Orlando (Tilda Swinton, in a profoundly subtle performance), is promised a generous fortune by the Queen provided that he “not grow old.” He then goes on to live for centuries, first as a man, and then as a woman.

Orlando has had a long and unbroken presence in world cinema since its original release in 1992, when it garnered more than thirty international awards, including two Oscar nominations and Best Young Film in the European Film Awards. It has become a standard teaching tool in film, media and literature courses worldwide and is frequently used as a ‘how to’ model of adaptation of a classic work. It is also repeatedly cited as the first example of a successful and uncompromising European co-production, now a standard way of making films, but at the time a groundbreaking form of international collaboration.

SONY PICTURES CLASSICS
Founded in 1992 by former Orion Classics heads Michael Barker, Tom Bernard and Marcie Bloom, Sony Pictures Classics is widely regarded as one of the top distributors of specialty and arthouse film in the U.S. and internationally. The company has released 37 Academy Award-winning films, and garnered 155 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture nominations for The Father, Call Me By Your Name, Whiplash, Amour, Midnight in Paris, An Education, Capote, Howards End, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Other Sony Pictures Classics films in the 2022 VAFF lineup include Living, Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams, The Son, and Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb