British filmmaker Sally Potter and her new film, Orlando, based on Virginia Woolf's novel of sex change, immortality, and androgyny, seem likely to redefine what we mean by the term "Renaissance man." It's young "hero," the 16th-century Orlando-- played by actress Tilda Swinton-- lives for 400 years; one morning halfway through the story, he wakes up as a woman. The $5-million visually brilliant entertainment garnered raves in Europe, walked away with the Sundance Film Festival, and is set for release here this month. A true Renaissance woman herself, Potter has choreographed works for her own dance company, composed music, and written and directed films since the age of 14, when her uncle lent her an 8mm camera. "I looked through the lens, and I was home," she says.

Potter found Orlando a prescient fable for the end of an awkward century. "We're at a point in history where history itself is beginning to not make sense-- the age of electronics, speed, mass immigration. People no longer know what their history is. That's a very personal crisis." Orlando's lesson, says Potter: "We have to let go of the past in order to come into the present."

Orlando was filmed in England, St. Petersburg, and Uzbekistan, with a Russian cinematographer and a Dutch production team. Historical periods were color-coded for mood, in place of expensive authenticity: Elizabethan, red and gold; the 18th century, pale blue; and Victorian, greens and purple. Single details-- a hatpin glittering like a third eye on the head of a Russian princess-- stand in for full-dress onslaught. Even the casting (Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth II) has its own droll sense of economy. "There's an aesthetic of omission to achieve a sumptuous effect," says Potter.

The film project of Orlando began with a scene from the book that stuck in Potter's mind's eye: a woman, posed in a field of spilled apples, staring up through the ice of a frozen river. How Potter got that shot (by setting up in a Russian naval tank built for testing submarines) is the kind of challenge she relishes in films: using the imagination as an engineering tool to freeze something as fluid as history-- or to melt something as frozen as gender.