ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY

ORLANDO, MA BIOGRAPHIE POLITIQUE

France | 2023 | 98 min

When someone proposes to make a documentary on his life, philosopher Paul B. Preciado declares that his biography had already been written about one hundred years ago by Virginia Woolf, in her Orlando. Thus begins the search for someone who can play the role, and the collective film itself. We see a multitude of Orlandos parading in front of the camera one after one, ready to perform an already written biography that never ceases happening, like a fertile theme variation that plays out in the present. Preciado presents a both elegant and ingenious film whose beating heart is speech and its transformative ability. Orlando, My Political Biography cuts in the present-day cultural and political discourse, that gets often stuck in bodies and their forms, all the while looking in biology for the ultimate confirmation of one’s identity, and not without a degree of violence. It reminds us that speech – precisely as it’s not flesh, but an ephemeral material – is capable of naming whatever exceeds, slips away, and is forever on the move, thus revealing itself as the ultimate guardian of the acknowledgment all bodies yearn for. (t.p.)