Tilda Swinton in Seven Incarnations
Recently, Tilda Swinton, the Scottish queer actress (or rather queer fish, as she calls herself), was awarded the Honorary Golden Bear for her lifetime achievement at Berlinale. Tilda is also known as “a messenger from another dimension,” “Derek Jarman’s muse,” and “David Bowie’s cousin.” She is the ultimate shapeshifter – the more eccentric the role, or at least the physical transformation, the better. This flamboyant, epic career – where Swinton has played archangels, witches, vampires, aliens, oracle dogs, hunched old characters (both women and men), mothers and daughters at the same time (even twice in the same decade), has multiplied, cut her hair, frozen butterflies with a spear, levitated, gone to bed as a man and woken up as a woman, died and come back to life – now seems to be nearing its end. Not long ago, Swinton stated that she might retire from cinema to provide palliative care, and The Room Next Door (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2024) is precisely about that. In fact, her latest roles are largely about different ways of confronting illness, death, and signs from the afterlife – and they also seem like deeply personal explorations.
Journalist and film critic, with a master's degree in film critics. Collaborates with Scena9, Acoperișul de Sticlă, FILM and FILM Menu magazines. For Films in Frame, she brings the monthly top of films and writes the monthly editorial Panorama, published on a Thursday. In her spare time, she retires in the woods where she pictures other possible lives and flying foxes.
