Orlando: My Political Biography

A Documentary by Paul B. Preciado

Taking Virginia Woolf’s novel "Orlando: A Biography" as his starting point, filmmaker Paul B. Preciado fashions a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto.

For almost a century, Woolf’s eponymous hero(ine) has inspired readers with their gender fluidity as well as their physical and spiritual metamorphoses across a three-hundred-year span. In making his film, Paul B. Preciado invites a diverse group of more than twenty trans and nonbinary people to play the role of Orlando and to 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.

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