Orlando, My Political Biography

You can’t ask a dead writer what she thinks of a letter addressed to her posthumously, of course, but Virginia Woolf would surely have been delighted with Paul B. Preciado’s scintillating and erudite discursive film. With a nod to the author’s groundbreaking 1928 novel, the trans activist and philosopher Paul B. Preciado has titled his debut film Orlando, My Political Biography. “I’m alive,” he says, “I came out of your fiction.”

In that imagining, an aristocratic young man changes into a woman overnight. In our society, however, this transition process is a hazardous and painstaking process. Thus, Ruben Rizzi, who has just turned 15, makes the emphatic choice to describe himself as a trans boy, in an acknowledgement of his history. Rizzi is one of the 26 modern-day Orlandos, aged between 8 and 70 and all wearing a white baroque ruff collar, who tell their stories.

Preciado is breathtaking in his merging of their testimonies with passages from Woolf’s Orlando. This visual and philosophical exploration of the transgender experience is simultaneously a rebuttal of binary thinking and a negation of any boundary between documentary and fiction.