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SYNOPSIS
Academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado's Berlin Film Festival award-winning doc tells his and others' stories of transition through unique reenactments and visual interpretations of Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography. |
"Orlando, My Political Biography is a daring work of autofiction, an exhilarating restaging of a magical text, and a collective confession that bypasses the demand for biographical and political truths to attain a deeper resonance. The directorial debut of the Spanish-born transgender author, philosopher, and theorist Paul B. Preciado, Orlando premiered in February of last year at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Teddy Award for Best Documentary Film and was nominated for the Berlinale Documentary Film Award. Most known, perhaps, for his genre-bending manual for self-intoxication, Testo-Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, Preciado turns his probing, dissatisfied, yet always-attentive gaze here on himself, on Orlando, and on this precocious thing we call trans and nonbinary identity. The result is, despite the limited budget and production value, nothing short of extraordinary.
I first read Orlando: A Biography, the 1928 novel by Virginia Woolf, as a teenager in Beijing, when I myself was experiencing what might be called “gender trouble.” To summarize an incredibly complex tale, Orlando tells the story of a 16-year-old Elizabethan boy who, after centuries of adventures, ends up as a 36-year-old woman in the year 1928. Somewhere on this journey, in a sumptuous room in Constantinople, Orlando the young man wakes up and finds herself a woman.
When Preciado was asked to make a film about his experience with transition, he said that “fucking Virginia Wolf had already written it in 1928.” He is right. But Orlando’s sudden and enigmatic change of sex, Woolf tells us, “did nothing whatever to alter their identity.” For me, Preciado, and the twenty or so trans and nonbinary people playing Orlando in the film, this transformation is more complex. “You didn’t know, perhaps,” Preciado says, addressing Woolf in his typically gentle voice, that “this was not how one became trans.”
In 2019, Preciado gave a talk to an audience of 3,500 psychoanalysts where he addressed them from the position of a speaking monster. “Je suis un monstre qui vous parle.” I am a monster who speaks to you. Can the monster speak? Orlando, My Political Biography is a kind of companion piece to that talk, in which Preciado lays bare the medical and psychiatric establishment’s consistent pathologization of trans and nonbinary lives as monstrous, their insistent marking of our bodies, narratives, and decisions as deviant; their compulsive desire to know the truth of our genders, to produce and control it through disciplinary means. The film, don’t worry, is more light-hearted. It fosters a kind of exuberance without sacrificing its political urgency. In Orlando, the individual voice of Preciado multiplies into a collective address. His I becomes a we, and the distance between documentary filmmaker and documented subject, between biographer and the subject of biography, between stage and life, collapses. We are all in this film. We, dissidents of the pharmacopornographic era where the lines of gender both biological and social are but palimpsestic fictions, we are all Orlandos in the making. We, the monsters, speak."
(from the introduction to the film by Andrew Lu, undergraduate concentrating in Comparative Literature and History of Art and Architecture)