Biography

Sally Potter made her first 8mm film aged fourteen. She has since written and directed seven 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).

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.
- IMDb mini biography by: Adventure Pictures

She was awarded the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2012 Queen's Birthday Honours List for her services to film. She is a director.

Trained as a dancer at the London School of Contemporary Dance and later co-founded the Limited Dance Company.

Left school at 16 to become a film-maker.

London, England: Film director

This is in awards - she won the Evening Standard best film screenplay award for The Party.

I wanted to dismantle stereotypes of all kinds. The British can be quite casual with their anti-Americanism without realizing how divided the country is. I was very struck during my last trip to see how much opposition there was to the Patriot Act and to feel the real atmosphere of fear in the air. People said that they were living in an atmosphere where it was increasingly difficult to speak out in opposition to the war.

I've always traveled with the films because I want the audience to be my teacher so that I can learn for the next one. But I have never had the sort of feedback that I've had with Yes. In Turkey, which was the first place where the audience was predominantly Muslim, the fact that there was a sympathetic Middle Eastern man in a main part was a news story, because it was such a rarity. The response there was very much more populist than in America - we were even in the Turkish Hello!

[on the advent of many films exploring young female relationships] The sleeping giant awakes. It's like people are suddenly seeing the power, the interior life that has come out of this great cultural silence. The stories haven't been told, but it's not as if they weren't there to be told.