Orlando, My Political Biography

11/22/2025

Using Virginia Woolf’s ground-breaking “Orlando” novel, written in 1928, as an imaginative template, this documentary follows a group of people at various stages of their gender transitioning processes and tells their stories partly through contemporary interviews and partly by each of them playing characters - usually the title one - from the story. Given it’s all but a century old, the book and these speculative sub-texts provide for a remarkably powerful template for their anecdotes as they almost weaponise it to depict the historical roles of the sexes over the centuries. Touching on religiosity as well as the inherent patriarchal nature of a society little evolved since the hunter-gatherer mentality, this film allows these young folk to raise some quite salient points about assumption