Courtesy of Janus Films

Screening of the celebrated documentary — featuring more than twenty trans and non-binary individuals in the role of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.

Note: Paul B. Preciado was under the weather and therefore unable to come to New York for the previously announced talkback/conversation with Jack Halberstam.

About Orlando: My Political Biography: 

“‘Come, come! I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.’ Taking Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography as its starting point, academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado has fashioned the documentary, Orlando: My Political Biography, as a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto which premiered and took home four prizes at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival. For almost a century, Woolf’s eponymous hero/heroine has inspired readers for their gender fluidity across physical and spiritual metamorphoses over a 300-year lifetime. Preciado casts a diverse cross-section of more than twenty trans and non-binary individuals in the role of Orlando as they perform interpretations of scenes from the novel, weaving into Woolf’s narrative their own stories of identity and transition. Not content to simply update a seminal work, Preciado interrogates the relevance of Orlando in the continuing struggle against anti-trans ideologies and in the fight for global trans rights.”

“Essential…[an] often funny, intellectually provocative, and finally deeply moving inquiry into trans identity.” 
–Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

2023 | French with English subtitles | 99 minutes

Co-presented by Columbia University School of the Arts and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender as part of the conference Trans Disruptions: The Future of Change.