Orlando, My Political Biography (2023)

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 assumptions and stereotypes, and about the roots of many of these. It does come from a very pro-trans perspective, and perhaps some of it’s assertions ought not to go entirely unchallenged, but the contributors are an erudite and engaging collection, from all walks of life and with all sorts of varying ambitions and aspirations for themselves and for their “community” at large. It’s provocative at times, maybe over-simplistic too, but it does ask questions of societal attitudes to it’s own people that often have no answers at all, let alone straightforward ones.