Orlando, My Political Biography

In 1928, Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando, the first novel in which the main character changes sex. A century later, writer and trans activist Paul B. Preciado decides to send a film letter to Virginia Woolf. Playful, urgent and brilliantly innovative in its way of exploring transgender identity.

The main character of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando goes to sleep as a man and wakes up as a woman. ‘No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing,’ Woolf writes. Now, almost 100 years later, Spanish writer Paul B. Preciado – the son of a garage owner and a seamstress – finds a brilliant way to express how much the novel meant to him.

Preciado organises a casting and gathers 26 contemporary trans and non-binary people, from 8 to 70 years old, who embody Orlando. With voiceover musings and staged narrative vignettes, he plays and juggles with Woolf’s text and in doing so, creates a modern portrait of this fictional character.