“Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”
Taking Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography as his starting point, academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado fashioned the documentary Orlando, My Political Biography—a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto. For almost a century, Woolf’s eponymous hero(ine) has inspired readers with their gender fluidity and physical and spiritual metamorphoses across a three-hundred-year span.
In making his film, Preciado invited a diverse group of more than twenty trans and nonbinary people to play the Orlando role and participate in this shared biography. Together, they perform interpretations of the novel, weaving into Woolf’s narrative their own stories of transition and identity formation. Not content to simply update a groundbreaking work, Preciado interrogates the relevance of Orlando in the ongoing struggle to secure dignity for trans people worldwide.
Click here to watch the trailer.
Orlando, My Political Biography comes to Blu-ray and DVD on June 25, 2024.
