BERLIN Feb 19 (Reuters) – Philosopher Paul B. Preciado did not want to make a film about his own gender transition, because British novelist Virginia Woolf had already done so a century before.
“Orlando: My Political Biography”, Preciado’s playful debut film, explores the struggles of trans and binary people through Woolf’s novel “Orlando”. In its opening scene, two young non-binary people sit reading a book in the woods.
“The way we present trans people through films is by destroying them through their image. I didn’t want to go into that tradition, but I didn’t want to go into the victim setting either,” Preciado said of his film, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on Saturday.
Woolf’s 1928 novel tells the story of Orlando, a young Elizabethan-era nobleman, who one night turns into a woman living three-hundred years later.
In Preciado’s film, 25 French-speaking trans and non-binary actors play…
