Screened as part of NZIFF 2023

Orlando, My Political Biography 2023

Orlando, ma biographie politique

Directed by Paul B. Preciado Framing Reality

Documentary, film essay, biography and performance piece meld together in Paul B. Preciado’s avant-garde, ruffed reclamation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. This award-winning exploration of trans lives re-imagines the past and asks who are in the present.

Aug 01

Hollywood Avondale

Aug 02

ASB Waterfront Theatre

Aug 04

ASB Waterfront Theatre

France In French with English subtitles
98 minutes Colour / DCP

Director, Screenplay

Producers

Yaël Fogiel
,
Laetitia Gonzalez

Cinematography

Victor Zebo

Editor

Yotam Ben David

Music

Clara Deshayes

Production Designer

Anna Le Mouël

Costume Designers

Thomas Goudou
,
Caroline Spieth

With

Paul B. Preciado
,
Oscar S Miller
,
Janis Sahraoui
,
Liz Christin
,
Elios Levy
,
Victor Marzouk
,
Kori Ceballos
,
Vanasay Khamphommala
,
Ruben Rizza
,
Julia Jimmy Postollec
,
Amir Baylly
,
Naelle Dariya
,
Jenny Bel’Air
,
Emma Avena
,
Lillie Vincent
,
Artur Verri
,
Eléonore Laurent
,
La Bourette
,
Noam Iroual
,
Iris Crosnier
,
Clara Deshayes

Awards

Special Jury Prize Encounters & Teddy Award for Best Documentary
,
Berlin Film Festival 2023

Festivals

Berlin
,
Sydney 2023

Elsewhere

In Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando, the titular protagonist changes gender midway through the story of their life, waking up in a woman's body. In his new documentary-film-essay response, Paul B. Preciado (Testo Junkie) expands this trans allegory, from Orlando’s singular gender journey to a collective constellation of modern trans experiences. It is from this point that the film takes its thesis: what if Woolf’s Orlando can be re-imagined as a modern-day biography of collective trans lives? Orlando, My Political Biography features a cast of twenty-six contemporary trans and non-binary people, aged 8 to 70, who all play Orlando.

Supporting characters include players missing from the reality of the politicised trans experience—from psychiatrists and their receptionists, to doctors and judges. Spoken lines from the novel meld with personal stories of trans actors in a surprisingly seamless manner, Orlando’s white ruff serving as an accompaniment to modern queer fashion. Sets are reconstructed while interviews take place, a bizarre disco-dance scene choreographs a “pharmacoliberation”, and the documentary is as much a film about the making of art as it is a compelling re-imagining of history. Superbly experimental and deconstructionist, Preciado reclaims non-binary gender identities within the trans spectrum, and explores what happens when people don’t fit within society’s strict confines. Coming at a time that is crucial for global trans rights, the film feels deeply and joyously made by trans people, for trans people: “Look, Virginia, what we have become. Do you want to come with us?”, although wider audiences will be rewarded with numerous treasures nestled within this intelligent piece of art. — Emlou Lattimore

“‘During the post-screening discussion, Preciado said that trans, queer, and migrant folks come from dispossessed places. Orlando then is a film that repossesses, in its affirmation, insistence and celebration of “every Orlando,” the trans and non-binary people who are not only forced into categories through institutional violence (discursive and embodied) from psychiatry to pharmacology to citizenship (some of the cast were unable to travel to Berlin due to the refusal of states to change names on passports), but who defiantly reject and resist such harmful boundary policing. The result is a perfect merging of political theory, rebellious collective will and radical imagination. The prolonged and buoyant standing ovation at Berlinale was well-deserved for Orlando: My Political Biography. It was, like the film, a life-affirming display of admiration and celebration that nearly erupted into a dance party, the infectious possibility of which reminds me of this Woolf quote: “There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph.’”—Ezra Winton, POV Magazine