A still from the documentary “Orlando, My Political Biography”

“The contemporary world is full of Orlandos who are changing the course of history,” says Spanish-born philosopher turned director Paul B. Preciado.

“Orlando, My Political Biography,” his documentary adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 pseudo-biography Orlando, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year — and took home four prizes — while interrogating the relevance of Woolf’s Orlando in the process.

The film is described as a “cinematic essay in conversation with Woolf’s 1928 satiric fantasy Orlando: A Biography, as well as “a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto.” Preciado, who first read Woolf’s novel at the age of 15, also describes it as “my own biography.”

In it, Preciado casts a diverse cross-section of more than 20 trans and non-binary individuals in the role of Orlando as they interpret scenes from the novel, weaving their own stories of identity and transition into Woolf’s narrative.

Choosing the cast

Preciado explains how he chose the cast this way: “The way I selected the other participants was by trying to understand if they could speak the language of Virginia Woolf. This, to me, was the most difficult aspect of any Orlando performance, because Virginia Woolf’s language is so sophisticated, so crystalized and sparkling, that it’s hard to speak her words without sounding phony or ridiculous.”

The documentary enlists a cast that includes well-known French LGBTQ+ figures to share the role of the novel’s eponymous hero as they perform interpretations of scenes from the novel, weaving into Woolf’s narrative their own stories of identity and transition.

It also includes footage of singer and trans pioneer Christine Jorgensen and fiery advocate Sylvia Rivera to help reflect the history of queer resistance.

Choosing the scenes

Preciado explains how scenes from Woolf’s novel were chosen for the film: “Some of the scenes were chosen by the Orlandos through the reading sessions . . . some Orlandos lobbied for certain scenes in the novel to be included in the film, and we went with those.

“The scene of Orlando returning to England by ship after having transformed into a woman, I really wanted to adapt this scene properly since it’s one of the crucial scenes in the novel. But it became so difficult. We went to the north of France and obtained a small boat that we had to pretend was bigger than it was–it was extremely expensive, and I had very little money with which to make the film. Very quickly we realized that this scene was impossible, that it wasn’t going to work. So we decided to make a mock-up of a boat in a studio and see how that would look.

“Many of the scenes I had in mind–especially since Orlando is a book of adventures and travel and changing epochs and countries–couldn’t be rendered on film as they are in the novel.

“Another example was a scene in the desert that became difficult to pull off since I had to find a desert that was nearby–and there are no deserts close to France!

“At a certain point I realized that faithfully adapting such scenes was less important than capturing the language of Virginia Woolf as well as representing the main adventure of the book, which is transitioning. It would be less about constructing the proper settings and decor and more of a spiritual or internal journey.”

Reappropriating Woolf’s words

“We discovered a freedom in reappropriating the words of Virginia Woolf,” Preciado said. “And not because Virginia Woolf said everything possible about transitioning, but because I think Virginia Woolf may have also been non-binary.

“In the last 40 to 50 years she’s been read–perhaps even over-read–as an exemplar of female and feminist authorship. But when re-reading her I realized she was very much at odds with what was supposed to be her own femininity. She was not comfortable with it and never aligned with it so much–she wasn’t even very interested in a naturalistic definition of feminism, at least as it existed during her lifetime.

“So I’ve thought, how interesting would it be if she was a non-binary author who lived during a time when the thought of being non-binary was impossible? That opened for me a very different way of reading Orlando. I’m not content with the politics of reading works through the identity of the author–for example, the idea that if the author isn’t trans then his or her book can’t be trans. Because maybe the author was able to recreate him, herself or themselves, in his, her or their own mind. The things we do exceed identity–otherwise if we have to be measured by our anatomy or whatever else then we’re going to be caged within the language of normative binaries. So that’s crucial for me.

“And when working on the readings of Orlando something started to happen–we brought Woolf into a contemporary, non-binary world, and a sort of joyful, amusing adventure began to occur in how we experienced her words, to the point where the cast members and their families would call me and say, ‘These readings are great, can we come back for more of them?’ Then it became clear to me that this was working, that we could use the language of Virginia Woolf against the language of normative identity.”

Now in theaters

Interested in seeing the film? Check this link for locations, dates, and tickets.