Of course, you can't ask a dead writer what she thought of a letter addressed to her posthumously. Virginia Woolf, however, would certainly have found Paul B's film sparkling and erudite and would have delighted her.
Philosopher and writer Paul B. Preciado comes up with one of the most insightful and intriguing films of 2023. For his first cinematic effort, Preciado has invited two dozen trans and non-binary people across generations and backgrounds to tell their stories through the time-traveling and gender-fluid protagonist at the center of Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando. This energetic collective portrait stays true to its creator's activist roots, shattering notions of identification and representation on the screen and reimagining the cinematic form beyond binaries.
"I am alive, I came out of your fiction," Preciado addresses to Woolf.
In the aforementioned book, an aristocratic young man turns into a woman. In our society, however, this process is dangerous and lengthy. One of the protagonists, Ruben Rizzi, who has just turned fifteen, chooses to refer to himself as a transsexual boy. Rizzi is one of 26 modern-day Orlando men, ranging in age from 8 to 70, who wear a white baroque collar with a ponytail and tell their stories in the film. Preciado breathtakingly connects their accounts to passages in the novel Woolf.
The film is a visual and philosophical view at the transgender experience while denying the boundaries between documentary and fiction.
