Orlando's Legacy: Letter from Paul B. Preciado To Virginia Woolf

Like the chorus of a 98 minute song, this sentence rhythms Paul B Preciado’s first feature film « Orlando, my political biography ». In 1928, Virginia Woolf wrote « Orlando », the first novel in which the main character changes gender in the middle of the story. Starting as a young nobleman in Elizabethan England, Orlando mysteriously transforms into a woman at the age of 30. The novel spans over four centuries, and Orlando experiences various historical and societal changes, ranging from falling in love with Sasha, a Russian princess, to becoming an ambassador in Constantinople.

In Preciado’s movie, everyone is Orlando, and Orlando could be anyone. Casting 30 trans and nonbinary actors and actresses, aged 7 to 70, Preciado writes a letter to Virginia, explaining his life journey, the reality of his trans identity, and erects a complete and most accurate portrait of today’s trans people’s lives in society. With a soft voice-over, the activists’ words take the spectator by the hand on a comforting journey across Virginia Woolf’s novel, the personal tales of the actors and actresses, and the corrections he would like to make on the author’s views of trans identity. Woolf’s Orlando has come out of her fiction and is living a life she could have never imagined through the experiences of thousands of people across the globe.

With a series of monologue scenes borrowed from Woolf’s original text and the own story of the protagnonists, fiction and reality dance together in a never-ending waltz of truths; the spectator never really knows where one stops and the other begins, leaving them with a positive thirst for more details, more emotions, more wonderful portraits.

«Orlando, My Political Biography », will, without a doubt, go down in history as a vital piece of work in the fight for recognition and support of trans people.

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