Victoria Harwood Butler-Sloss is half Armenian, half English, brought up in Nicosia on the island of Cyprus. She moved to London at eighteen and began her career as a dancer at the Raymond Revuebar. She trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and spent twenty years as an actress, playing a slew of mad, bad, exotic foreigners on British television and performing in the West End, The Royal Court and European tours amongst others. After getting married she moved to LA, started a family, continued to work in voice-overs and wrote her first book, The Seamstress of Ourfa, the first in a trilogy beginning in the Ottoman Empire in 1895 and following four generations of women until the present day. The Seamstress of Ourfa was published on June 2018.
“A Flock of Birds” is her first film as writer/director/producer/DP. Based on a chapter from her book it is based on a family story with a fictional twist. Previously she produced, wrote and appeared in “Cyprus Summer 1974” a short documentary based on a diary she wrote during the coup and subsequent war that divided Cyprus, her home. It also details an exhibition staged in summer 2014, in which the diary was enlarged and displayed to the public.
She is currently working on another project, “Rest in Pieces”, a docudrama about death and what it means to be buried in a cemetery in no man’s land.
