Orlando, My Political Biography French Film Festival

Orlando, My Political Biography
(Paul B. Preciado, 2023, 103 min, France, French w/ English subtitles, DCP)

"Come, come! I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another." Taking Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography as its starting point, academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado has fashioned the documentary, Orlando: My Political Biography, as a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto which premiered and took home four prizes at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival. For almost a century, Woolf’s eponymous hero/heroine has inspired readers for their gender fluidity across physical and spiritual metamorphoses over a 300-year lifetime. Preciado casts a diverse cross-section of more than twenty trans and non-binary individuals in the role of Orlando as they perform interpretations of scenes from the novel, weaving into Woolf’s narrative their own stories of identity and transition. Not content to simply update a seminal work, Preciado interrogates the relevance of Orlando in the continuing struggle against anti-trans ideologies and in the fight for global trans rights. Fleet and visually inventive, Preciado’s film is a robust polemical inquiry into contemporary trans personhood and political disenfranchisement that points the way toward a possible utopia.

“[S]parklingly intelligent, Godard-puckish and moving, capable of deadpan wit and the most intimate swirl of ideas and emotions.” – Los Angeles Times

“Orlando: My Political Biography is a dive into the collective trans consciousness, a discussion between Orlandos across time and place, an attempt to discover new ways to understand and express ourselves.” – Little White Lies