Kumu Documentary: Orlando, My Political Biography
Dir Paul B. Preciado
France 2023, 98 min
In French, with Estonian and English subtitles
In 1928, Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando, the first novel in which the main character changes sex in the middle of the story. A century later, the trans writer and activist Paul B. Preciado decides to send a film letter to Virginia Woolf: her Orlando steps out of her fiction.
The cast in the film come to play Virginia Woolf’s fictional character while also narrating their own lives; and a series of mid-twentieth century trans archives that evoke the real historical Orlandos in their struggle for recognition and visibility. The spectator gradually finds Orlando’s bearings as the portrait emerges of a collective being with multiple faces, voices and bodies. The film follows the same structure as Virginia Woolf’s novel: a travel diary through history, both intimate and political.
“I first read Woolf’s book when I was a teenager in Spain, well before I knew that gender transitioning was possible. Woolf’s fictional character allowed me to imagine my own life, to desire and to embody change. It turns out that with the years, I have become an Orlando. My biography is made up of the collective history of thousands of invisible Orlandos. It is a history of struggle within an oppressive gender- and sex-binary regime. Being trans is not just to transition from femininity to masculinity (or vice versa), but to engage in a process of internal “Orlandisation”: a poetic journey in which a new language to name oneself and the world is invented.”
Paul B. Preciado
A gender transition is a transformative voyage, a movement of dis-identification, a practice of freedom, rather than a mere production of identity. Thus, the film draws the portrait of a changing world and the ongoing gender and non-binary revolution.
The film premiered in the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival and received the Teddy Award for best LGBT+ documentary.
Paul B. Preciado is a writer, philosopher, curator and one of the leading thinkers in the study of gender and body politics. Among his different assignments, he has been Curator of Public Programs of documenta 14 (Kassel/Athens), Curator of the Taiwan Pavilion in Venice in 2019, and Head of Research of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA). His books are key references to queer, trans and non-binary contemporary art and activism. He was born in Spain and lives in Paris.
We thank Festheart for the Estonian subtitles.
The film is being shown as part of the public programme of Kumu Documentary and the contemporary art exhibition “melanie bonajo. When the body says Yes+”. The exhibition is open until April 28, 2024.”
