UK director Sally Potter is teaming up with debut producers Joanna Vymeris and Solomon Golding for Orlando, Now, a retelling of her Oscar-nominated 1992 film Orlando.
Orlando, Now is a re-framing both of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando, and of Potter’s film of the same name. Through song and dance, the new film will explore Orlando’s 400 year journey, with questions of class, race, sex, Britain’s imperialist history and what it means to be British now.
In a departure from the original novel and film, a Black narrator and chorus will operate as a guide for the audience, bringing to light stories that were not told in the book and its adaptation.
Joanna Vymeris and Solomon Golding, producing graduates of the UK’s National Film and Television School (NFTS), will join the team of Adventure Pictures, alongside Potter’s collaborator and the original Orlando producer Christopher Sheppard.
The team are in Cannes to identify partners for the project. Both Vymeris and Golding have creative backgrounds: the former as an acrobatic gymnast who founded circus company The Feathers Of Daedalus while studying at Cambridge University; the latter as the first Black British-born dancer at UK company The Royal Ballet.
“With fresh eyes and ears, using the power of music and song to lift us up and carry us through 400 years, this new film will be a celebration of changing points of view about who and what we are,” said Potter.
Describing the film as “about the here and now”, Sheppard said that Vymeris and Golding “bring a young, diverse and very energetic approach that is essential to understanding and telling that story.”
Golding said it “is almost stranger than fiction” to be working on a retelling of a film he considers “a catalyst to a life-long love affair with cinema”; while Vymeris said the new title “will be unlike anything you’ve seen or heard before.”
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