By Nik Narain, Class of 2025
Orlando: My Political Biography is a 2023 French experimental documentary directed by Paul B. Preciados. The film is a modern expansion of the 1928 Virginia Woolf novel Orlando: A Biography in which the main character becomes a 36-year-old woman mid-way through the story. Preciados casts 26 trans and nonbinary individuals from around the world to play the role of Orlando. Together, they interpret Woolf’s original work, weaving their own narratives of transition and identity formation, creating a collective biography of trans experience.
In the beginning of the film, Preciados asserts that he doesn’t need to write his own autobiography, because Virginia Woolf did so already nearly a century ago. As I’d never read the book prior to the film, hearing its passages read aloud for the first time struck a resonant chord for me: “Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.” “Life is a dream. ‘Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.” I almost cried when I heard Woolf’s words. Actually, I did cry.
Trans people have historically looked to literature as clues for the fundamental nature of our existence. As one of the Orlandos states, many of us have had to be poets, using our words to bring light identities that hadn’t yet existed in mainstream consciousness. Woolf wrote her book before the term “transgender” was even coined, and it’s thought to be the first English-language trans novel. Hearing her writing reinterpreted and spoken in voices, faces, and bodies that looked like my own was a truly powerful experience, one that fostered a profound sense of connection among people I’ve never met, and one that reinforced my dignity and pride as a trans person.
What I appreciate about this documentary is that it not only seeks to retell Orlando’s story but dissect and elevate it. As the film’s Orlandos relate to his love for solitude and literature, among other things, they also critique the relatability of his narrative as a white, English aristocrat whose gender changed “overnight.” How might a person of color or non-English speaker contextualize “Orlando” within themself? How might we change the notion of transition being an “instant switch,” instead portraying it as a gradual process of becoming? Is that not the reality for most trans people, especially given the extensive and cumbersome procedures for hormone therapy and legal name changes?
In a time of growing anti-trans legislation and violence, it is sadly refreshing to view in a theater setting a piece of trans media made for and by trans people. As our stories continue to get misused and broken apart by mainstream media, medicine, and politics, it’s a beautiful thing to come together and affirm the power of literature in reclaiming our experience.