A trailer has been released for Orlando, My Political Biography, Paul B. Preciado's "playful French-language cinema essay" in which more than 20 trans and non-binary people take on the role of the title character in Virginia Woolf's 1928 book Orlando: A Biography, "using Woolf's words to ground their own experiences," IndieWire reported.
Orlando, My Political Biography received four prizes at the Berlin Film Festival before heading to the Telluride, Toronto, and New York film festivals. Janus and Sideshow Films will release the movie November 10 in New York City and November 17 in Los Angeles, with an expansion to follow.
From the official synopsis: "Taking Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography as its starting point, academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado has fashioned the documentary as a personal essay, historical analysis, and manifesto. 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 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."