Los Angeles Filmforum, Semiotext(e), and LA OLA present

 Orlando: My Political Biography

In person introduction by Jennifer Doyle, Professor of English at UC Riverside

Tickets: $15 general, $8 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members

Masks are highly recommended at Filmforum shows - N95 or KN95.

Digital screening

Filmforum joins with Semiotext(e) and LA OLA to host a screening of one of the most highly acclaimed films of 2023, Orlando: My Political Biography, by Paul B. Preciado.  Unusually for us, even though the film did play for a couple of weeks at Laemmle Theaters, it may have escaped the attention of many interested parties.  Its unique use of performance, costume, declamatory statement, language, personal revelation, and exploration of identity and trans-ness places it somewhere between the films of Straub & Huillet, Godard, and Sally Potter’s more conventionally theatrical Orlando.

"Few movies this year have lived in my head as long and as happily as “Orlando: My Political Biography,” which I’ve been thinking about since I first saw it in September. Written and directed by the Spanish-born philosopher and activist Paul B. Preciado — a trans man making his feature directing debut — the movie is, at its simplest, an essayistic documentary about transgender and nonbinary identity that draws inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando: A Biography.” Yet trying to squeeze “My Political Biography” into a tidy categorical box is fundamentally at odds with Preciado’s expansive project, which is at once an argument, a confession, a celebration and a road map.

"It’s also a sharp, witty low-budget experimental work of great political and personal conviction, one that breathes life into Woolf’s novel about a 16-year-old boy in Elizabethan England who, after centuries of trippy adventures, enigmatically ends up as a 36-year-old woman in 1928, the year the novel was published. Woolf dedicated the book to her lover Vita Sackville-West, whose son Nigel Nicolson described it as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” one in which Woolf weaves Vita “in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds.” - Manohla Dargis, New York Times.

 WINNER

Teddy Award: Best Documentary - 2023 Berlinale

Special Jury Award - Encounters - 2023 Berlinale

Tagesspiegel Reader's Jury Prize - Encounters - 2023 Berlinale

Special Mention: Best Documentary Award - 2023 Berlinale