New York Film Festival 2023

[Chris Knipp]

PAUL B. PRECIADO: ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY (2023)

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ONE OF 27 ORLANDOS IN ORLANDO

Embracing Woolf's sex-changing history as a bible of trans lore

Preciado, a writer and philosopher, opens with narration about how Virginia Woolf's novel "Orlando" – where an English poet lives over centuries and, at one point, changes genders from male to female – doubles as his own biography. Since Woolf wrote his biography before he was born, Preciado decided to construct his directorial debut as a correspondence to Woolf after her death. He recruits 27 trans and non-binary people, including himself, to play the eponymous role while talking about their own lives. The revolving door of subjects allows Preciado to use an episodic structure that lets him change things up on a scene-to-scene basis.

Preciado says Virginia Woolf's Orlando is his biography, and takes this famous work of English fiction as a kind of bible of trans life. The film doesn't go very deeply into Woolf's book; it's the idea of it that counts for Preciado. Viewers of this film, which is in French, with one extended speech in Spanish, will remember it as a procession of different young and old (but mostly young) trans people who announce themselves as appearing in the film to play the role of Orlando, and donning a big ruff collar - a feature of seventeenth-century dress worn, notably, by both men and women - as symbolic "costume" for their. . . audition?

They don't tell much about themselves, either. But what is striking is the merry procession of trans people, some with light voices, some with deep voices, taling about their lives, the wonder of hormones and injections and changes they are for the most part happy about.

The imortant thing is that this is a happy and even celebratory film that trans people can identify with and rejoince in.