Documentary

ORLANDO: MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY

2023
1 HR, 38 min
JAN 5 → JAN 18, 2024

Details

Released November 10, 2023, France

Documentary

1 hour, 38 minutes

Janus Films

French with English Subtitles

Starring

No starring credits.

Director

Paul B. Preciado

Film Information

“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.

Film Stills

Additional Credits

Paul B. Preciado Director

Reviews

“Sparklingly intelligent, Godard-puckish and moving, capable of deadpan wit and the most intimate swirl of ideas and emotions.”

Robert Abele

Los Angeles Times

“With Orlando, My Political Biography , Preciado has crafted a towering manifesto that’s as nimble in presenting abstracted gender theorizations as it is in capturing moving emotional truths.”

Manuel Betancourt

Variety

“Preciado’s lightness of touch and intellectual nimbleness buoys the movie, lifting both it and you.”

Manohla Dargis

New York Times