A century after the publication of “Orlando: a biography” by Virginia Woolf, Paul B. Preciado, philosopher and trans activist, addresses a letter to tell her that her character has come true: the world is becoming Orlandesque. Preciado calls a cast: "Who are the contemporary Orlandos?" 25 different people, all trans and non-binary, from 8 years old to 70 who come to play Woolf’s fictional character while also narrating their own lives; and a series of mid twentieth century trans archives that evoke the real historical Orlandos in their struggle for recognition and visibility.

The spectator gradually finds Orlando’s bearings as the portrait emerges of a collective being with multiple faces, voices, bodies. The film follows the same structure as the Virginia Woolf ’s novel: a travel diary through history, both intimate and political. “I first read Woolf’s book when I was a teenager in Spain, well before I knew that gender transitioning was possible. Woolf’s fictional character al- lowed me to imagine my own life, to desire and to embody change. It turns out that with the years, I have become an Orlando. My biography is made of the collective history of thousands of invisible Orlandos. It is a history of struggle within an oppressive gender and sex binary regime. Being trans is not just to transition from femininity to masculi- nity (or vice versa), but to engage in a process of internal "orlandisation": a poetic journey in which a new language to name oneself and the world is invented.”

A gender transition is a transformative voyage, a mo- vement of disidentification, a practice of freedom, rather than a mere production of identity. Thus, the film draws the portrait of a changing world and the ongoing gender and non-binary revolution.

Paul B. Preciado is a writer, philosopher, curator, and one of the leading thinkers in the study of gender and body politics. Among his different assignments, he has been Curator of Public Programs of documenta 14 (Kassel/Athens), Curator of the Taiwan Pavilion in Venice in 2019, and Head of Research of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA). His books, Counter-sexual Manifesto (Columbia University Press); Testo Junkie (The Feminist Press); Pornotopia (Zone Books); An Apartment in Uranus (Semiotexte and Fitzcarraldo), and Can the Monster Speak (Semiotexte and Fitzcarraldo), and Dysphoria Mundi (Grasset, Graywolf and Fitzcarraldo) are a key reference to queer, trans and non- binary contemporary art and activism. He was born in Spain and lives in Paris.