Marleen Gorris

Known for her feminist sensibility and her depictions of relationships between women, Marleen Gorris began writing scripts at the age of thirty. Her writing-directing ventures in her native Netherlands include the highly controversial A Question of Silence (1982), Broken Mirrors (1984), The Last Island (1991), and Antonia's Line (1995). The latter, which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, is characteristically unflinching in its depictions of female characters' life struggles but is nevertheless tender, almost sentimental. Gorris directed the acclaimed English-language films Mrs. Dalloway (1997), based on the novel by Virginia Woolf and The Luzhin Defense (2000), originally a Nabokov novel.