Orlando, My Political Biography review – a dive into the collective trans consciousness

As trans people, we have always had to search to find ourselves. And not just in the obvious way. To see the traces of ourselves in a history that seldom gave us a name and often wiped us from its pages. We have to read between the lines. We have to look for fewer material connections, echoes and resonances left unexpressed in culture, whether that’s through Bugs Bunny, The Joker or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

But Virigina Woolf’s 1928 novel ​‘Orlando: A Biography’ offers something more tangible: it’s a story about gender transformation, and so countless trans people over the last century have seen themselves in its gender transgressing hero.

Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado considered naming himself Orlando at the start of his own transition, and therefore casts a wide variety of trans people, from all across the spectrum of age and identity, to play Orlando in this adaptation of sorts. Around a loose re-telling of the novel, the film consists mostly of Preciado’s ruminative narration and interviews with each Orlando that locate intersections between their life stories and those of their fictional namesake.

Preciado makes this transition – the adaptation of a still-living novel – another of the film’s subjects. Through unadorned cinematography we are shown the process: we see Orlandos put into costume and make-up; we see backdrops lowered onto soundstages. This bareness, alongside a total earnestness – the female penis is talked of with entirely unselfconscious reverie – can make the film feel almost embarrassing. But an honest kind of embarrassing.

Many trans people, myself very much included, want to forget the awkward parts of our transition, before we knew how to wear our gender elegantly. But to erase those parts of ourselves, Preciado argues, is to erase our history. To be trans means living a fundamentally different life to a cis person, so to tell our stories we must think in a fundamentally different way; we cannot use a language that was built to exclude us. A truly trans cinema must be built from the ground up.

Preciado lays out these arguments rigorously and in a direct, pedagogical way befitting his academic background (Orlando is really a fragmented essay film) which some might find cold, perhaps a cis audience who won’t see the same hope for their own and their community’s future in the much older and much younger trans people. But that doesn’t really matter.

Orlando: My Political Biography is a dive into the collective trans consciousness, a discussion between Orlandos across time and place, an attempt to discover new ways to understand and express ourselves. Preciado would rather share contradictory perspectives than perfect his own because he recognises his film as a product of its moment. The conversation and the community will continue on further, but because he captures its sense of flux – of translation – his film will continue to resonate even if, like a picture taken before we knew how to do our make-up well, it might make us wince while doing so.

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