Sally Potter

Sally Potter made her first 8mm film aged fourteen. She has since written and directed eight feature films, as well as many short films (including THRILLER and PLAY) and a television series, and has directed opera (Carmen for the ENO in 2007) and other live work. Her background is in choreography, music, performance art and experimental film. ORLANDO (1992), Sally Potter’s bold adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s classic novel, first brought her work to a wider audience. It was followed by THE TANGO LESSON (1996), THE MAN WHO CRIED (2000), YES (2004), RAGE (2009) and GINGER & ROSA (2012). Her latest feature, THE PARTY, was released in 2017.

Sally Potter is known for innovative form and risk-taking subject matter and has worked with many of the most notable cinema actors of our time. Sally Potter’s films have won over forty international awards and received both Academy Award and BAFTA nominations. She has had full career retrospectives of her film and video work at the BFI Southbank, London, MoMA, New York, and the Cinematheque, Madrid. She was awarded an OBE in 2012. Her book Naked Cinema - Working with Actors was published by Faber & Faber in March, 2014.

Sally Potter co-founded her production company Adventure Pictures with producer Christopher Sheppard. (8/19)

Available Title(s):

The Gold Diggers

A film by Sally Potter, 1983, 90 min, BW

THE GOLD DIGGERS is the ground-breaking, exquisitely photographed early feminist film by Sally Potter, director of ORLANDO and THE TANGO LESSON. "Drawing from the same well of avant-garde anti-structure as enfant terrible Jean-Luc Godard and playwright Bertolt Brecht, Sally Potter’s whip-smart THE GOLD DIGGERS is brimming with cultural and political signifiers that combine to form…

Thriller

A film by Sally Potter, 1979, 34 min, BW

Since its release in 1980, Sally Potter's rewriting of Puccini's opera, La Boheme, has become a classic in feminist film theory. A model for the deconstruction of the Hollywood film, THRILLER turns the conventional role of women as romantic victims in fiction on its head. Mimi, the seamstress heroine of the opera who must die…

The London Story

A film by Sally Potter, 1987, 15 min, Color

This lively, accessible spy spoof revolves around the unlikely alliance of three eccentric characters and their mission to uncover government foreign policy duplicity. Beautifully and humorously choreographed against London's most famed locales. In technicolor! Produced in association with the British Film Institute and Channel Four Television.

Women Filmmakers in Russia

A film by Sally Potter, 1990, 51 min, Color

Since Lenin's fervent embrace of cinema in the 1920s, more women have worked in the film industry in Russia than in the West. This fascinating documentary - produced during glasnost and prior to the dissolution of the USSR - includes interviews with actresses, critics, technicians and leading directors Kira Muratova and Lana Gogoberidze. Clips from…