Orlando, My Political Biography

There’s a trail you can follow from Virginia Woolf’s classic 1928 novel about a sex-changing, immortal poet living in aristocratic Britain over the years, through to Sally Potter’s fantastic 1992 film starring Tilda Swinton as the androgynous Orlando, via a postmodern German New Wave film in the 1970s and a theatrical production seen at the Edinburgh Fringe in the 1980s, all the way to this, Paul B. Preciado’s fiction-reality hybrid documentary about the contemporary existence of trans and non-binary people. Using the past to explore the present, Preciado journeys through the political nature of gender, what it means to be ‘male’ or ‘female’ or neither, decentralising the Orlando narrative from one person’s biography and instead giving voice to 26 different people and stories. Between reenactments and reinterpretations, no two scenes in this documentary are alike, nor is this like any other documentary. It’s an exciting and vibrant take on a subject not always portrayed with such radiance and such empathy, and it’s a film that I’m sure will be talked about for many years to come.

Daniel Kallin