News

A new short film brings together an unlikely pairing.

This week, a teaser debuted for director Sally Potter’s new short “Look at Me”, which will have its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, and stars Chris Rock and Javier Bardem, along with dancer-actor Savion Glover.

Read More: Chris Rock Reveals He Turned Down Offer To Host 2023 Oscars

“Rehearsals for a fundraising gala become the arena for a struggle between two men; one, the gala director and the other, a richly talented but unstable rock drummer,” the official synopsis reads. “As their battle for expression and control escalates against a relentless rhythmic backdrop, their public and private selves explosively collide.”

The teaser features a scene of intense confrontation between Rock and Bardem, giving a taste of the 16-minute short’s tone.

According to a statement from the director, the film was “originally conceived as a self-contained short story within a...

At a casual glance, it would seem that British filmmaker Sally Potter is something of a chameleon, moving between subjects as wide-ranging as an person who lives as both a man and a woman over a few hundred years (Orlando), Europe pre-Holocaust (The Man Who Cried), the fashion industry (Rage), a British political drawing-room farce (The Party), and an examination of her own struggles in the film industry (The Tango Lesson). But as my friend and colleague So Mayer titled her book on the multitalented auteur, Potter is interested in the politics of love, in all its variations. For her latest foray into this landscape, she has enlisted (yet again) the services of some incredible acting talent - in this case, Javier Bardem, Elle Fanning,...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

UK writer-director Sally Potter will receive the Dilys Powell Award for Excellence in Film at the 40th London Critics’ Circle Film Awards.

Previous winners of the accolade include Michael Caine, Judi Dench, Quentin Tarantino, Isabelle Huppert, Kate Winslet and Pedro Almodovar.

London-born Potter made her first 8mm short film at age 14, and then in 1983 wrote and directed her first feature The Gold Diggers, starring Julie Christie. Her breakthrough film was the 1992 Oscar-nominated drama Orlando, based on the Virginia Woolf novel and starring Tilda Swinton in her breakout role.

Subsequent features include the BAFTA-nominated The Tango Lesson (1997), in which she starred as a filmmaker named Sally, The Man Who Cried (2000) with Cate Blanchett and Johnny Depp, Yes (2004) with Joan Allen, Rage (2009) with an all-star cast led by Judi Dench, Ginger & Rosa (2012) with Elle Fanning and Alice Englert, and comedy-drama The Party (2017) with Kristin Scott Thomas, Timothy Spall and Patricia Clarkson.

Companies attending for first time include A24, Cornerstone Films, Film Constellation.

A Brexit-inspired comedy written by Sally Potter and new work from The Florida Project producer Kevin Chinoy are among the line-up at Ontario Creates’ 14th International Financing Forum (iff), set to take place from Sept 8-9 in association with and during the Toronto International Film Festival.

The competitive feature film co-financing and co-production event will bring together producers, sales agents financiers, distributors and agents from Canada and the international sector for two days of networking, one-on-one producer and executive meetings, a state-of-the-industry panel discussion, a luncheon, and a producers’ opening night networking reception.

By Glenn Dunks

What a shock it was to hear over the last 24 hours of the deaths of both Robby Müller and Claude Lanzmann. These two icons of European cinema were 78 and 92 respectively and both gave so much to the universe and there are not enough hats to tip to their memories and their legacies.

Robby Müller was the Dutch-born cinematographer whose regular collaborations with the likes of Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and Lars Von Trier were the stuff of legend. Who can forget those stunning tableaus of Breaking the Waves or his regular plays on black and white with Jarmusch as well as Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson. I'm not as well versed on Jarmusch's films as others, but I gather Dead Man with Johnny Depp is the one worth gawking over the most.

And I know it’s become a little bit fashionable to roll one’s...

Previous awardees include Nanni Moretti, Béla Tarr and Andrzej Wajda.

UK writer-director Sally Potter will receive the Fipresci 93 Platinum award at the 8th edition of Transatlantyk Festival to be held in Lodz, Poland from July 13-20.

The festival will also present five of Potter’s films in its Close Up section: Orlando, The Tango Lesson, Yes, Ginger & Rosa and The Party.

Potter directed her first feature film, experimental drama The Gold Diggers, in 1983. She has subsequently directed seven further features, including twice Oscar-nominated Orlando (1992) and last year’s satirical dinner party drama The Party.

The Fipresci 90+ prize celebrates the history...

The laughs hurt so good, and the guests at this shindig treat each other like dartboards for 71 minutes. Yes, that's short for a movie, but your nerves couldn’t take more. The Party is the work of Sally Potter, the gifted experimental filmmaker who had a seismic effect on world cinema with Orlando (1992), based on the Virginia Woolf novel and starring Tilda Swinton as an Elizabethan gent who morphs into a woman over the next four centuries. We bring this up only to prepare novices for the fact that Potter,...

The resolutely independent British film-maker is back with the most broadly entertaining film of her long career – a star-studded black comedy about a disastrous dinner party that reflects the dark state of the nation

Sally Potter isn’t quite sure how to react to seeing her name on a T-shirt. With bemusement, she turns over the garment I’ve given to her, as if concerned I might be playing a prank, but there it is: Sally Potter, emblazoned in bold black capitals on white cotton. She holds it up to her slender frame, its glaring whiteness almost garish against her tidy black turtleneck, and squints down at it. “People are wearing these?” she asks sceptically. Hers is one of several similarly stark tees celebrating women in film, run up by Etsy startup Girls on Tops, and now popping up all over the international film world. Isabelle Huppert has one. Ava DuVernay has one.

Back in 1992, Sally Potter was a pretty big deal. She had just released “Orlando” to universal acclaim, which featured an exquisite performance from Tilda Swinton as the titular nobleman who moved through centuries of British history without aging. It was an ambitious film that put Potter on the map and gave us hope that she might be the next important voice in indie cinema. However, with every ensuing movie she made (“The Tango Lesson,” “The Man Who Cried,” “Yes,” “Rage,” “Ginger & Rosa“) it felt like she had hit her peek too early.

Continue reading ‘The Party’ Trailer: Patricia Clarkson, Cillian Murphy & More Let Loose at The Playlist.

Sally Potter is not normally known for comedy; her most famous film, Orlando (which put Tilda Swinton on the map) certainly has its comedic moments, but her work (such as The Tango Lesson and Yes) tend to more serious examinations of what my colleague Sophie Mayer calls the politics of love. In her latest film The Party, however, she turns her astute eye in a most hilarious way to this politics of love (and the love of politics). Part biting satire, part drawing room farce, its frenetic vision of the most disastrous celebratory dinner is a masterpiece, and a timely commentary on recent political events and the said politics of human emotion. Janet (Kristen Scott Thomas) has just been appointed Shadow Minister of Health in the UK Parliament, fulfilling...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

'When you push through your limits, it gets painful – it's like a scab coming off'

What first drew you to film-making?

First, watching films as a child. Second, putting a camera to my eye when I was about 14. My uncle and his then partner lent me their 8mm movie camera. I realised that, when you frame the world, you see and feel different things.

What was your big breakthrough?

The premiere of Orlando at the Venice film festival. It was startling: I don't think I'd ever had people appreciate something I'd done on such a scale.

Was it always your intention to take a multidisciplinary approach to your art (1)?

At the time, these life choices don't even feel like choices, and they're very confusing, especially as a young person. But with hindsight, it was the best possible training to be a director, which is very much a mongrel art form:...

Directed by acclaimed filmmaker Sally Potter, who brought us Rage, Orlando and The Tango Lesson, sixties British drama Ginger & Rosa features two outstanding lead performances from Elle Fanning and Alice Englert as the film's titular best friend protagonists. To celebrate the DVD and Blu-ray release of Potter's Ginger & Rosa on Monday 11 February, we have Three Blu-ray copies of the film to give away to our army of cinephile readers, courtesy of the kind folks at UK distributor Artificial Eye. This is an exclusive competition for our Facebook and Twitter fans, so if you haven't already, 'Like' us at facebook.com/CineVueUK or follow us @CineVue before answering the question below.

Read more »...

After proving herself a worthy actress in films like Super 8 and Somewhere, Elle Fanning‘s most substantial role yet is coming to Us theaters this year. After a successful fall festival run, the coming of age period piece Ginger & Rosa, from director Sally Potter (Orlando, The Tango Lesson), will see a limited release this spring and we’ve got the [...]...

As we've outlined in our Most Anticipated Films Of 2013 Part 1 & Part 2, there are a lot of potentially great films on the horizon across the next twelve months. However, there are also a handful of movies that we've already seen that will be heading to screens in the new year, that we already know will be worth tracking down. And one to mark on your calendar is "Ginger & Rosa." The latest effort from "Orlando" and "The Tango Lesson" director Sally Potter, the film is potent blend of politics, coming-of-age, burgeoning sexuality and more, all set against the backdrop of the changing tides of the 1960s. And leading the cast is an outstanding Elle Fanning, who gives a "tranformative" and "heartbreaking" turn opposite Alice Englert (daughter of Jane Campion and also solid), in the film that tracks two teenage girls, and their slowly evolving and fraying relationship.  This brand new, exclusive U.

Sally Potter is nothing if not original. She made her name writing and directing “Orlando” - an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel, previously considered unfilmable due to its 400-year timespan and protagonist who changes gender at will. She chose to follow this international hit with a film (“The Tango Lesson”) starring herself, in a role for which she learned to dance and sang on camera. Her next film (“The Man Who Cried”) starred Johnny Depp. Her next film (“Yes”) was written entirely in verse. Her next film (“Rage”) premiered exclusively on mobile phones. Clearly, then, Potter is a unique artist. But being a woman too has made her something of a poster girl for female auteurs. In Britain at least, it is hard to think of any woman of her generation with a comparable stature or filmography. But despite her trail-blazing status, it is not always helpful to dwell on Potter’s gender.

Sally Potter is nothing if not original. She made her name writing and directing “Orlando” - an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel, previously considered unfilmable due to its 400-year timespan and protagonist who changes gender at will. She chose to follow this international hit with a film (“The Tango Lesson”) starring herself, in a role for which she learned to dance and sang on camera. Her next film (“The Man Who Cried”) starred Johnny Depp. Her next film (“Yes”) was written entirely in verse. Her next film (“Rage”) premiered exclusively on mobile phones. Clearly, then, Potter is a unique artist. But being a woman too has made her something of a poster girl for female auteurs. In Britain at least, it is hard to think of any woman of her generation with a comparable stature or filmography. But despite her trail-blazing status, it is not always helpful to dwell on Potter’s gender.

Ginger & Rosa, which charts the friendship of two teenage girls in postwar London, draws on the film-maker's own memories of the Cuban missile crisis

You would never call Sally Potter a ginge. Not just because you wouldn't dare. Or because it would be like squirting ketchup over a slice of Poilane, or programming a double bill of The Tango Lesson and StreetDance 2 3D. You wouldn't even risk "strawberry blonde". The famed Potter mane is a big mingle of lemon and silver and cinnamon, which shimmers, Titian-ish.

Yet there is little doubt that she is, in some sense, Ginger, the carrot-topped hero of her new film. Ginger & Rosa is about baby-boomer best buddies, born on the same day, whose friendship in postwar London comes under strain when Rosa (Alice Englert) starts shagging Ginger's glamorous academic dad (Alessandro Nivola), freshly separated from her housewife mum (Christina Hendricks, doing downtrodden). The plot might not be autobiography,...

Brit director Sally Potter hit the film world with a major splash at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival with "Orlando," starring the incomparable Tilda Swinton. Since then, Potter's films have been impeccably crafted gems with limited appeal, from "The Tango Lesson," starring Potter herself, to "Yes," which she wrote in iambic pentameter. With "Ginger and Rosa," written after her mother's death in 2010, Potter consciously tried to craft her most emotionally accessible film to date. And yet this 1962 London Bohemian family drama focused on two teen girls (Elle Fanning and Alice Englert, daughter of Jane Campion) coming of age under the threat of nuclear disaster seems destined, with its Thelonious Monk score, to appeal to older art house audiences. Alessandro Nivola and Christina Hendricks play one set of less-than-perfect London parents. Given my own history with narcissistic neglectful intellectual parents, I was a sucker for this...

★★★☆☆ This month sees the rerelease of Sally Potter's The Tango Lesson (1997) on both DVD and Blu-ray. Famous for her generation and gender-swapping 1992 drama Orlando, which starred Tilda Swinton, Potter is a director notorious for her reluctance to conform to the archetypal templates of Hollywood filmmaking. A director named Sally (Potter) visits Paris to work on her latest screenplay. It's here she meets Pablo (Pablo Vernon), a Tango dancer who begins to teach her the art of this seductive dance - as they fall in love.

Read more »...

With a Toronto premiere set for today, we’ve got our first trailer for a coming-of-age period piece from director Sally Potter (Orlando, The Tango Lesson). Previously titled Bomb, Ginger and Rosa features We Bought a Zoo, Super 8 and Somewhere star Elle Fanning in a major leading role as a girl in 1960s London as she figures out just exactly what she believes in.

I’ve heard slightly mixed things, but this is a solid trailer that looks to give Fanning some much-deserved, seemingly strong material to work with. Backed by a promising ensemble, check out the trailer below via The Guardian for the film also starring Timothy Spall, Alice Englert, Oliver Platt, Jodhi May, Alessandro Nivola, Christina Hendricks and Annette Bening.

Synopsis:

In 1962 London, two teenage girls, best friends since they were toddlers, are driven apart by a scandalous betrayal. Their mothers met in the hospital during childbirth,...

The Toronto International Film Festival is a ludicrous bounty of cinematic riches, showcasing hundreds of potentially amazing films both old and new. That it’s all crammed into only 10 days means it’s too much for any one mere mortal to even get a proper grasp of. With that “problem” in mind, here’s a painstakingly narrowed list of 30 to try and catch.

Antiviral

David Cronenberg’s son Brandon’s first feature, Antiviral may well sate the appetites of Cronenberg fans who lament the director’s late-career turn into (relatively) middlebrow fare. The creepy teaser promises eerie, creeping body horror, artfully executed, of the sort Daddy used to make.

The ABCs of Death

Horror anthologies are always a tantalizing prospect, but rarely do the segments come together to form a satisfying whole; usually, a weak effort or two sours the bunch. The ABCs of Death might well be the most ambitious film of its kind,...

British auteur Sally Potter has been absent for a while, but in an interview with Screen Daily, she and producer Christopher Sheppard talk about their new film Ginger and Rosa, which she recently finished shooting in London.Potter's work has always stretched boundaries, both narratively and aesthetically.  Orlando (1992), which introduced the wider world to the acting genius that is Tilda Swinton, turned the traditional costume drama on its head. The Tango Lesson (1997) is a gorgeous black-and-white documentary that saw the filmmaker herself step in front of the camera for record a personal journey through dance and love. Yes (2004) showed that, indeed, contemporary films can use iambic pentameter dialogue and have it be rich and sexy. Her last work, Rage (2009) is arguably her...

There aren't many experimental video and performance artists who can also say they've directed a film starring international megastar Johnny Depp, but Sally Potter is one of them. Well, the only one. Making her feature debut with the 1983 Julie Christie film "The Gold Diggers," she came to international attention with her excellent 1992 adaptation of Virginia Woolf's "Orlando," starring Tilda Swinton, before going on to make "The Tango Lesson," "The Man Who Cried" (which starred Depp and Cate Blanchett), and the underrated, spoken-entirely-in-iambic-pentameter "Yes," with Joan Allen.

Despite holding an online casting call to try and find a British or Irish girl to play the lead in Sally Potter's latest film Bomb with over 1500 applications, the producers have played it safe and cast American starlet Elle Fanning, as reported by Deadline.

Bomb, written and directed by Sally Potter, is about two young rebels at the forefront of political, social and sexual change, and is set in London in the early Sixties.

13 year old Elle will take the lead role of Ginger, described as the ‘brainy’ one who wants to get involved with the anti-nuclear movement in 1960s London, but as the cold war meets the sexual revolution, it’s her family that threatens to explode. She appeared in this summer’s blockbuster Super 8 and will shortly be seen in Cameron Crowe's forthcoming drama We Bought A Zoo.

Joining her will be 17 year old New Zealander Alice Englert,...

Sally Potter, the award-winning writer/director of Orlando, The Tango Lesson, The Man Who Cried, Yes and Rage is currently casting her new feature.

The film is set in London in 1961 at the time of the "Ban the Bomb" movement. Ginger and Rosa are nearly 16 and lifelong best friends who do everything together. Ginger is the "brainy" one who wants to get involved in the antinuclear protests while Rosa is more interested in boys.

Stars of Sally's previous films include Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Lily Cole, Judi Dench and Tilda Swinton.

She is looking for two teenage girls, aged 14 to 18 from the UK or Ireland, for the leading roles.

If you want to be considered in the casting process visit

http://www.sallypotter.com/casting 

Deadline Extended: because of the enormous level of interest the deadline for submissions has been extended by one week to midnight on Sunday 27 February.

The movie Rage opens to a black screen. The clicking sound of typing and the words "All the Rage" appear. A cursor hesitates before deleting the first two words. The word Rage fills the screen. The audience is then informed that the film to follow is "by Michaelangelo." Although we never see Michelangelo or hear him speak, he adds prefaces in writing to the multitudinous portrait interviews that he films backstage at a New York fashion show. We are introduced to fourteen characters, all filmed against eye-popping solid color backdrops...

Simon Abkarian is the show’s John Galliano-like fashion designer, Merlin. He proclaims "I am an Event!" but also posits himself as both sensitive and dangerous. For him a "dress is not a dress," it is a revelation, "a sacred vessel for the miraculous." As such, he regards himself as a high priest of fashion.

Judi Dench is Mona Carvell,...

• A little bit of fluff (Harald Zwart’s Pink Panther II), an Oscar hopeful (Stephen Daldry’s The Reader) and some prestige titles from master filmmakers who might have lost their touch and offerings from less-seasoned directors are among the world preems that have been announced in the Berlin Film Festival’s Competition and Out of Competition section). Some long-awaited films from the veterans in Sally Potter, Theo Angelopoulos and Chen Kaige (see pic) are being paired with filmmakers such as Moodysson, Bouchareb and Rebecca Miller. Along with Miller and Moodysson’s films, I’m looking forward to seeing Oren Moverman’s directorial debut – which will be soon a couple of weeks earlier at Sundance. Here is the complete ten list of films announced. The fest begins on the 5th of February. Alle Anderen Germanyby Maren Ade (The Forest for the Trees)with Birgit Minichmayr, Lars Eidinger, Hans-Jochen Wagner,

...

While we eagerly await more info (and trailers) for the films playing at Sundance (and hopefully news on where Cory McAbee's Stingray Sam is going), the first competition and out of competition titles have been announced for one of the other biggest fests on the planet, the 59th Berlin International Film Festival, and all I have to say is Wtf? Pink Panther II is playing out of competition?! Who's running this menagerie? They redid the entire program this year, so I hope they're still going to have the genre goods.

You can check out the real short list after the break or you can read the press release.

Alle Anderen Germany

by Maren Ade (The Forest for the Trees)

with Birgit Minichmayr, Lars Eidinger, Hans-Jochen Wagner, Nicole Marischka

World premiere

Rage Great Britain / USA

by Sally Potter (The Tango Lesson, Orlando)

with Dame Judi Dench, Jude Law, Dianne Wiest,...

Screened at the Toronto International Film Festival

TORONTO -- Sally Potter (The Tango Lesson, The Man Who Cried) makes films about women liberating themselves, and often that involves them dancing. The tango in her newest film is the dance of relationship politics, in all its forms, shapes, sizes and colors.

Thematically, Yes is certainly her most ambitious work to date. Joan Allen is an Irish-American biogeneticist unhappily married to an English politician (Sam Neill). Escaping this stifling home life, she accepts the amorous advances of a handsome Lebanese man, played with grace and dignity by Paris stage actor Simon Abkarian. Their initial adulterous happiness, though, gets complicated by social-political-racial factors.

She's a privileged, white married woman, he's a Middle Eastern former surgeon reduced to working as a chef ("Where once I picked shrapnel out of people's bodies and cut their flesh to save their lives, now I cut the flesh of animals"). Her elegant circle of family is filled with pretense and vanity; he is shoved by prejudice and conflict into a lonely, claustrophobic corner of lower-class London. Out of this dynamic of interracial attraction, Potter spins a chamber epic of class, values and social justice.

If it all sounds very heavy, it is, even though there are scenes of lyrical wit and wry absurdity. To top it off, Potter has written all the dialogue in iambic pentameter, making the piece a linguistic treat. The performances also are unanimously supreme, from Allen's usual nice work to British comedian Shirley Henderson performing the Greek chorus role as the family maid to Neill's complex and empathetic husband, who likes to play air guitar to B.B. King's blues.

Despite many interesting mise-en-scene moments, the film disappointingly feels as sterile as the family's immaculately clean house. In a sense, the movie is too ambitious. Drawing on issues as far-ranging as Middle East politics, career vs. family, classicism, racism, God and even the morality and ethics of scientific research, Potter stretches the canvas too wide for the audience to get a firm grasp of the gritty personal, intimate struggle of two very appealing adult characters.

Even as the words are splendid and poetic, Potter visually tries a little too hard. The elaborate camera movements, CCTV texturing and stilted frames offer much style without adding that much substance. Like Allen's main character, "Yes" is suffocated by its own self-importance.

As the affair drifts into an emotionally draining abyss, Allen decides to escape to Cuba, hoping her lover will join her there. By this point, we're not clinging to the mystery of whether he will go to her or return to his native Beirut. We're wondering what is the political and symbolic significance of the final act being set in a communist, atheist, anti-capitalist country like Cuba?

YES

Greenstreet Films and U.K. Film Council present

An Adventure Pictures Production in association with Studio Fierberg

Credits:

Writer/Director: Sally Potter

Producers: Christopher Sheppard, Andrew Fierberg

Director of Cinematography: Alexei Rodionov

Production designer: Carlos Conti

Costume Designer: Jacqueline Durran

Sound: Jean-Paul Mugel, Vincent Tulli

Editor: Daniel Goddard

Music: Sally Potter, Fred Frith

Cast:

Cleaner: Shirley Henderson

She: Joan Allen

Anthony: Sam Neill

He: Simon Abkarian

Kate: Samantha Bond

Grace: Stephanie Leonidas

Aunt: Sheila Hancock

Running time: 95 minutes

No MPAA rating...