Orlando, My Political Biography 2023 Movie Review
The title makes it clear. On one hand, there is Orlando , the character in the novel Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf . On the other hand, My Political Biography , because what the philosopher, writer, professor, activist and now filmmaker Paul B. Preciado tells in his film is a kind of biography focused on the aspects of what it means to be a trans person and the political implications. and their pending subjects.
Paul B. Preciado himself tells us the origin of this Orlando. My political biography is in a project by the Franco-German television network Arte to tell his own life. To this proposal he responded that that life had already been told, that Virginia Woolf wrote it in 1927, that it was titled Orlando: a biography and that if they wanted, he himself could direct a documentary adaptation of the British writer’s work. The result won the Special Jury Prize in the Encounters section, a special mention for best documentary and the Teddy (the equivalent of our Sebastiane) for best documentary in the last Berlinale and is presented in this Zinemaldi within the sectionZabaltegi – Tabakalera.
Through her knowledge of the source material, her sensitivity and her empathy, Preciado fluidly and naturally establishes a dialogue between past and present, between Woolf ‘s novel and the testimonies of the Orlandos of the present, a group of twenty-five trans people who At the same time that they interpret the character of the novel, they relate episodes from their own lives. The baroque and literary texts of the novel are skillfully and lucidly woven together with the testimonies of the different trans people she has counted on to tell the story of her life, that of Orlando, and that of all of them.
In the film there is no chronicle of specific events, dates and data. It is the reflection of an evolution and a feeling. About what it means to be a trans person today, contrasting it with what Virginia Woolf said at the beginning of the 20th century about a character who was born and lived as a man of high nobility in the Elizabethan period and ended up struggling as a woman several centuries later. Finding the numbers in common and looking for the differences.
Unlike what happened with Orlando , whose transition from man to woman occurred while he was sleeping, trans people today must go through a long process to transition, which, as shown in the film, science has resolved more or less adequate based on therapy, hormones and surgical operations, but just as happened to Orlando centuries ago, society, its norms and its prejudices continue to be the great impediments for trans people. And where, as Preciado shows in the film, there are still many pending issues, despite the progress made by the collective throughout the 20th century, since Virginia Woolf ‘s novel was published until today.
Orlando: my political biography is a militant film. An essay film that talks about what has been achieved, but above all it vindicates what remains to be achieved. Without resorting to victimhood or exhibitionism. Focusing on the dignity of people forced to fight all their lives. A film whose nature seems derived from the characters whose lives it portrays: Orlando. My political biography flows between film genres, between fiction and non-fiction, making a binary genre classification of it almost impossible.
