A fixture of London's avant-garde dance and performance art circuit since the 1970s, this English experimental filmmaker gained international critical attention and acclaim with "Orlando" (1993), a fantastic costume drama based on Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel.

Starring Tilda Swinton and Billy Zane, this elegant and stylized satire presents a fanciful critique of gender politics as it presents 400 years in the life of a man who becomes a woman to escape the constraints of England's assigned sex roles. Film critic Amy Taubin, writing in the Village Voice observed that that though the film is