“We all have a bit of Orlando in us.”—Paul B. Preciado
Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography, the story of a young man who grows up to be a woman, gets a contemporary reimagining by writer, philosopher, and curator Paul B. Preciado (Testo Junkie). Sending a cinematic letter to Woolf, Preciado brings together past and present trans and gender-fluid lives, while also retracing his own personal journey. A transgender and nonbinary intergenerational cast speak as themselves, embodying Orlando in ways that are both political and poetic. Preciado’s stylistically and visually inventive film reimagines and celebrates Woolf’s original writing, grounding her fictional narrative in multiple biographies of the film’s exuberant participants. (2023, France, French with English subtitles, 98 min.)
Bio
Paul B. Preciado is a writer, philosopher, curator, and one of the leading thinkers in the study of gender and body politics. Among his different assignments, he has been curator of public programs of documenta 14 (Kassel/Athens), curator of the Taiwan Pavilion and collaborator with artist Shu Lea Cheang on her exhibition at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, and head of research of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA). His books—Counter-sexual Manifesto (Columbia University Press); Testo Junkie (The Feminist Press); Pornotopia (Zone Books); An Apartment in Uranus (Semiotexte and Fitzcarraldo), Can the Monster Speak (Semiotexte and Fitzcarraldo), and Dysphoria Mundi (Grasset, Graywolf, and Fitzcarraldo)—are key references to queer, trans, and nonbinary contemporary art and activism. He was born in Spain and lives in Paris.
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