Orlando: My Political Biography (2023) Movie Script
1
Someone once asked me:
"Why don't you write your biography?"
I replied: "Because fucking Virginia Woolf
wrote my biography in 1928."
I'm sorry I said
"fucking" Virginia Woolf.
I said it
with tenderness and admiration
because your writing seemed
impossible to surpass.
But also,
I say it with rage
because you represented us trans people
as aristocrats in colonial England,
Who, one fine day, wake up
in a woman's body.
You didn't know, perhaps,
this was not how one became trans.
It was much more difficult.
We risk our lives every time.
And I wanted to write to tell you
I am one of your Orlandos.
I am alive. I came out of your fiction.
The contemporary world
is full of Orlandos.
ORLANDO, WH ERE ARE YOU?
We're changing the course of history.
HAVE YOU SEEN ORLANDO?
FROM LOVE TH EY HAD SUFFERED
TH E TORTURES OF THE DAMN ED
So I decided to write a letter to you,
who had written thousands of letters
and received thousands more.
I might as well write you a letter
now you are, in the organic sense, dead,
even though, in inorganic terms,
you have never been as alive as now.
It's one of the things
I've learned from reading you:
life begins before we are born
and, of course, ends long affer we die.
So, just as you wrote my biography
before I was born,
I decided to send you a letter
affer your death.
Dear Virginia,
I'm writing to you
as I think I'm your Orlando.
We should meet.
I feel I'm changing fast, so don't delay.
I'd like to show you
all my metamorphoses and crash tests.
I'm Janis Sahraoui.
I n this film I'll be
Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
I love my name.
It is very important to me and...
My mother gave it to me.
I'm very attached to her.
I lost my mother
when I was a child, at 7.
And it's something I really want to keep
from her. It's something that's...
important to me,
because I know she chose my name.
I like the way it sounds.
There is something very musical
and even very non-binary, in fact.
I'm Oscar Rosza Miller.
I n this film I'll be
Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
Orlando was a name friends wanted
to give me when I started
my gender transition.
I didn't feel capable
of bearing this name.
Perhaps I was held back by the
aristocratic semblance of the character,
by the English thickness of his blood,
by his pale face and blond curls...
Nothing could be further
from the existence
of the son of a garage owner
and a seamstress
in an anonymous town in the north
of Spain than the life of Orlando,
inspired by your lover
Vita Sackville-West.
Maybe that's why I called myself
Paul and not Orlando.
Would you tell me the story
of Orlando by Virginia Woolf?
Orlando is a young boy, a teenager,
and at the end of the book,
it's a woman in her thirties.
Well, this person changes bodies
in the middle of the book.
Oh, yeah?
We don't know
how long this person will live
because we go through centuries
during the book,
while Orlando is only 30.
It's inspired
by a person who really existed.
Oh, OK.
The girlfriend
of the chick who wrote it.
Turn your face.
- You're a bit of an Orlando.
- Yeah!
You too!
We all have a bit of Orlando in us.
This is the child Orlando.
Now I define myself
as a non-binary person,
but I consider myself changing.
Their style was not similar
to that of men of letters of their time,
nor to that of the women.
There can be no doubt about my sex...
though the fashion of my time
disguises it.
The clothes, my whole corporality is very
important as the way I want to be seen...
it's really not like a man or a woman.
Around the fact
that Orlando is transitioning,
it's not stigmatized in the book...
It's beautiful to see it
like that because...
Actually, this is not the point...
You just let it flow.
It's just a person
who unfolds their life.
To have written this at that time,
it's incredible.
And it's also an extremely feminist book.
It's also a big "fuck you"
to the patriarchy!
He never loses, or she never loses,
the connection to nature
and their love for...
for trees. There's a real sensitivity.
I took my first hormones in a park.
I was in a park in Paris
and I sat down and meditated,
and I was surrounded by nature
next to my house
and it felt good. I said to myself
that I wanted this moment
to be important.
This was the first image
I wanted to keep,
so it's funny to be here.
I love to feel...
beneath all this summer transiency,
the earth's spine beneath me.
I lean against it
for the hard root of the oak tree
is that to me;
it is the back
of a great horse that I ride...
Or the deck of a tumbling ship -
it is anything indeed hard,
for I feel the need of something
which I could attach my floating heart to.
This heart that tugs at my side;
this heart
filled with spiced, amorous gales
every evening
about this time
when I walk out.
I tie it to the oak tree...
and as I lay here,
gradually the flutter
in and about me stills itself;
the little leaves hang.
The deer stops;
the pale summer clouds stay;
my limbs grow heavy
on the ground ;
and I lay so still
that by degrees the deer steps nearer
and the rooks wheel round me
and the swallows dip and circle
and the dragonflies shoot past,
as if all the fertility and amorous
activity of a summer's evening
weaves its web about my body.
My taste is broad, I love flowers,
simple flowers,
the wild have a fascination for me.
I love solitary places,
vast views,
and the charm of feeling
for ever and ever and ever alone.
When I was a child,
I remember
never being able to choose,
and I think
that feeling stayed with me.
I don't want to choose
one thing or another,
I want to be able to make
an explosive mix.
That's always been the case.
I think that this thing
that my parents call "phases,"
or what I like to Cali
passages of my life, are epochs.
Life is not at all like a biography.
It is not a series of episodes
or sentimental adventures
or descriptive scenes
or even the servitude of daily existence.
But it consists
in the metamorphosis of oneself,
letting oneself be transformed by time,
becoming not only other,
but others.
I n your novel,
at certain moments in the story,
driven by extreme suffering,
Orlando sleeps for a week,
a month, a year...
That is how Orlando
crosses the centuries.
I remember reading your novel
before I knew
that sex change really existed,
or at least before I met someone
who had gone through it
when I was 14 or 15.
I n your book, Orlando's sex change
happens in his sleep.
I thought that if it happened to Orlando,
maybe it could also happen to me.
Then sleep became for me
the magical realm in which
the gender transition took place.
Perhaps this explains
why I sleep so much and so well.
That's why nights have become
silent waiting rooms
in which, immersed in my thoughts,
I wait for the change to take place.
I imagined the beds as a dreamlike,
painless operating table
where my lying body
was recoded.
I believed
sleep could act on the body
like a chemical process
acts on an element.
I thought sleep was like freezing,
or like evaporation:
a process that induces a change in form
but not in meaning.
There are parts of Orlando's life,
dear Virginia, that you forgot to tell.
So I have to tell you about them
if I am to make their biography,
that is to say, my biography.
You write about the meeting
of Orlando and Queen Elizabeth
as a confrontation between Orlando's
free, poetic and still-childish spirit
and the violence of the imperial power.
But you forgot to mention
a second, equally important confrontation.
From the 19th century on, those who,
like Orlando, cross gender boundaries
are confronted
with the power of psychiatry.
Look at your Orlandos...
They did not live
as aristocrats or poets.
They were reduced
to being patients of psychiatry.
You also knew a lot about psychiatry.
You were like us, asylum fodder.
Not as a trans person, or as a lesbian
(you were in the closet about that),
but as a great melancholic.
Look, that one is me.
I too ended up in a psychiatrist's office
for the first time at 14,
when my parents realized that I was...
They used to say
"too masculine a woman."
Then I had to go back again when I wanted
to get a legal gender change.
That's what you didn't say.
Neither in "Orlando"
nor in "A Room of One's Own ."
You were one of us.
Orlando.
Orlando Kristin, please.
Yes, that's me.
I'm Liz Kristin.
I n this film I'll be
Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
I'm Frdric Pierrot. I n this film
I'll be Dr. Oueen, a psychiatrist.
Please sit down.
Before we start,
I must inform you that there will be
an additional fee of 80 euros,
compared to the rates
covered by the social security.
No checks or credit cards.
Yes, I know.
Very well.
So, you were sent by your mother.
According to her, you persist
in dressing as a girl and talking
about yourself in the feminine.
Yes, I had a fight with her.
The question I ask myself is:
How and for what reason
did you believe yourself...
How can I put it?
Authorized
to wear a skirt as a young man?
I am not a man.
So you're a woman?
I wouldn't exactly say that either.
But what is really your sex?
There's no doubt about my sex,
though the fashion of my time
disguises it.
Would you say
your father is masculine?
Yes, very masculine.
He went on the Crusades
and brought back a lot of Moorish heads.
I ndeed.
So he is not the problem,
you do not identify with him?
No.
So you have a female identification.
You think... you feel
confined,
trapped, locked up
in your male body, right?
What an obsession with the binary.
No, I am...
a living body
trapped in a normative regime.
Sorry. I don't understand.
I will try to ask you
a more direct question.
Do you hate your sexual organs,
for example, your penis?
No, I have a female penis
and I have no problem with that.
A female penis...?
I nteresting...
But you must be talking about a fantasy,
not a biological reality.
Is your sperm female?
Of course.
Organs and body fluids
are neither male nor female.
The discourse of sexual binarism
is an invention of modernity.
Well, do you offen have
these kinds of ideas, or thoughts?
When reading poetry...
I think I suffer from...
literature-sickness.
Poetry...?
Fascinating.
Well, we'll look at all that in detail.
Follow me.
Does anyone want one?
I do.
Yes, I do.
I'm waiting for a prescription.
So be careful what you say to him,
because Dr. Queen is very strict.
If you tell him
you're non-binary,
he'll send you home
with a kick in the ass
and no pills.
You have to tell him
that you hate your genitals
and you want to be a straight woman.
But I don't!
- Do you want your pills or not?
- Yes.
So shut your mouth
and act like a good girl.
You must be freaking out, Virginia,
seeing your Orlandos
exchanging hormones.
You know, in the 20th century,
just affer you died,
hormones started to be marketed
by the pharmacological industry,
but not just for us
trans people,
but mostly for the birth control pill.
The hormones for trans women and
those for the pill are exactly the same.
The only difference is
that, for cis heterosexual women,
the prescription is automatic,
whereas, for trans women,
it depends on a psychiatric diagnosis.
Anyone want some T?
Well, yeah, I do.
I've waited two months
for my prescription.
- Shall I give you an injection?
- Yeah.
- A little 150?
- Yeah.
OK...
Drop your pants, my little darling.
OK?
Here goes...
Look, bitch, this little shit
Do you want to know what's in it?
Your Liberationi
Don't let Freud, don't let Lacan
Get in your dreams and your mind fuck
Who owns your history?
God? The state? Psychiatry? The law?
The corporations?
Anyone hut youi
It's time to bite
You might be synthetic, but not apologetic
You are not the doctor's bitch
You might be synthetic, but not apologetic
You are not the doctor's bitch
Their categories are pathetic
You are much more poetic
Prosthetic but magnetic
You are not the doctor's bitch
Look, Virginia
What we have become!
Do you want to come with us?
Pharmacoliberation
They say you are dysphoric
But it's just metaphoric
They protect their privileges
They are scared of beauty
I am your Orlando, Virginia
Do you really think
that I could ever, ever live like this?
Pharmacoliberation
Faced with the task
of telling my biography,
I find myself in the position you were in
when you wanted to do Orlando's biography.
How to film the biography
of a trans person today?
Or to put it another way,
how to construct an Orlandoesque life,
a life of a gender poet in the midst
of a binary and normative society?
I agree with you,
fiction is not opposed to truth,
and every individual life
is a collective history.
I'm Ruben Rizza. I n this film
I'll be Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
The Great Frost was the most severe
that has ever visited these islands.
Birds froze in midair
and fell like stones to the ground.
The mortality among sheep
and cattle was enormous.
Corpses froze
and could not be drawn from the sheets.
But while the country people
suffered the extremity of want,
and all trade was at a standstill,
London enjoyed a carnival
of the utmost brilliancy.
Your "Orlando," Virginia, is a book
about the metamorphosis of subjectivity,
not only about sex change.
The first revolutionary metamorphosis
is poetry,
the possibility of changing
the names of all things,
including the proper name.
The second and most profound
metamorphosis is love.
That's why Orlando falls in love
with the arrival of the Great Frost
and the transformation
of the state of water,
the most essential of the elements,
into ice.
Your book was also a love letter to Vita,
who was your lover for some months.
When you met her,
she was a successful writer,
and you, too experimental,
were her editor.
For you, she was elusive.
Rich heiress
of an aristocratic lineage
and married woman
with multiple lesbian adventures,
she would break your girly heart.
Poetic justice, "Orlando" would become
your first great literary success
and a scandalous book
that Vita's family would try to ban.
At night, the carnival
was at its merriest.
The moon and stars blazed
with the hard fixity of diamonds,
and to the fine music
of flute and trumpet,
the courtiers danced.
I had just brought my feet together
when I beheld, coming from the pavilion
of the Muscovite Embassy,
a figure,
which, whether boy's or woman's,
for the loose tunic and Russian trousers
disguised the sex,
filled me with the highest curiosity.
The person, whatever the sex,
was of medium height,
very slenderly fashioned
and dressed in oyster-colored velvet,
trimmed with unfamiliar green fur.
When the boy,
for alas, a boy it must be -
no woman could skate
with such speed and vigor -
swept almost on tiptoe past me,
I was ready
to tear my hair with vexation.
If the stranger was a man,
all embraces were out of the question.
They came closer.
Legs, hands, carriage were a boy's,
but no boy ever had a mouth like that;
no boy had such a chest;
no boy had eyes which looked
as if fished from the seabed.
Finally, coming to a stop
and sweeping a curtsy
with the utmost grace to the King,
who was shuffling past, they stopped.
They were not a handsbreadth off.
I contemplated them, I trembled,
I was hot, then cold,
I burned to leap
in the burning breaths of the summer,
to crush acorns,
to embrace chains and paddles.
I decided to name him or her
Sasha
affer a white fox I had as a child.
I'm Castiel Emery. I n this film
I'll be Sasha
from Virginia WoolFs "Orlando."
Growing up, I had a lot of dysphoria...
But I wasn't sure if it was
gender dysphoria or if it was
just that I didn't like my body,
like most teenagers.
I was 7 years old.
As a child, I didn't really understand,
because I think I wasn't mature enough
to comprehend
what was happening to me.
But I was always in the in-between,
whether it was in my clothes,
my toys, my friendships, everything,
I was always in-between.
Even I felt in-between because
I was told "You're a girl,"
so I thought "I'm a girl"...
but I thought: "I'm not totally a girl
but I don't know what else."
No one ever said to me:
"Yes, you have gender dysphoria.
I'm diagnosing you
as transgender, transsexual."
On the contrary,
I've had shrinks tell me:
"No, it's just a phase, you're a woman,
I know that."
I started to feel bad about myself,
I couldn't look at myself in the mirror,
I couldn't stand myself.
I was very angry,
but we didn't know why.
So, I saw several specialists,
psychologists, psychiatrists.
At first, they told me it was because
of my weight. I was an overweight child.
They said: "Hide the cookies,
your child will get better."
I've been trying
to take hormones since 2017
and I still can't. I tried to go
through the public health sector.
But they thought
I was too feminine in my clothing style,
because I wear jewelry,
I'm not a man.
I started the puberty blocker treatment
when I was 11
because I started my female puberty,
and it was really painful
because I was seeing my body change,
like absolutely... I wanted the opposite.
I saw I was getting breasts and hips
and I didn't want that.
So I was put on a hormone blocker
treatment for three years.
I started testosterone
in July, so eight months ago.
The top surgery really liberated me.
It let me play more
with my clothing style,
and with my way of being, in fact.
It opened something up.
I think the hormones will have
exactly the same effect.
So I think it'll have
even more of an effect.
I was so happy!
It was everything I wanted for 4-5 years.
I dreamed of it every night.
At the beginning of my transition,
I had the impression
that I had to prove my masculinity,
so I did everything
to be extremely male:
with very dark clothes,
I walked in a caricatured way,
rolling my shoulders like that,
I spoke with a very deep voice,
I had an angry look
to have a very masculine appearance.
And in fact, affer about a year -
I did it for a year -
I realized
it was ridiculous because...
masculinity can come
in many different forms.
I still have a long way to go
because I'm still young, I'm only 15,
but it's true that I've already had
a great journey with masculinity.
I still have dysphoria
about other things...
Yes! But top surgery has helped me
so much. Sometimes I see I don't feel well
and I just remember
that I had top surgery,
I run a hand over my chest or see myself
in a T-shirt, it changes everything.
Today I define myself as a trans boy
and not just as a boy.
It's true that a lot of people ask me:
"Why don't you just say
you're a boy?"
But when I just present myself as a boy,
I erase all that I lived
as a trans person and...
It deletes a part of my history,
so I prefer to present myself
as a trans boy.
I feel that, in our society today,
there is a lot of emphasis on love...
on romantic love,
for a couple, two people, exclusivity,
leading to a future
where you live together, with children,
and that's not at all what attracts me.
It was with a person called Sasha
who I met in a demonstration.
And it's true that it was weird because...
when I was younger,
a year or two ago,
everything to do with the other
and above all, with love...
I had the impression that as long as
I hadn't finished my transition,
and wasn't at ease with myself,
it wasn't a good idea
to want to be with someone else...
because I wouldn't be mature enough
within myself
and I wouldn't have the right
to do that. But I totally do.
And on top of that,
Sasha, who is also a trans boy,
made me... feel understood very quickly.
I felt supported very quickly
by a person I didn't know.
It was one of the first times.
Three girls were hitting on me -
Clorinda, Favilla, and Euphrosyne -
all very feminine,
very binary, very straight...
which I'm not.
All would have made perfect wives
for the nobleman I was supposed to be,
but I wasn't interested in them.
Lawyers were already doing
marriage contracts
with Lady Margaret,
then came the Great Frost.
Like Orlando, I too fell in love
for the first time on a snowy day.
I kissed a girl in the cold,
the warmth of her mouth entered mine.
I have never loved anyone
like I love you.
You are snow,
cream,
marble,
cherries,
you are alabaster,
golden wire
and none of these.
You are an olive tree
and a fox in the snow,
you are a melon, a pinecone,
you are spring,
you are an emerald,
you are the waves of the sea
seen from a cliFop,
you are the sun on a green hill
which is yet clouded.
But you noticed
that I am neither a boy nor a girl.
Yes.
You're like nothing I've ever met before,
and that's why I love you.
You know that...
if I stay here,
I'll have to marry Lady Margaret,
so...
let's leave together.
Will you run away with me?
Yes, yes.
I'll come to meet you
tomorrow at midnight.
It will be the day of my life.
Long before midnight,
I was already waiting...
listening for the slightest step,
speculating on every sound.
I was waiting for Sasha to come alone,
in her cloak and trousers,
booted like a man.
Suddenly I was struck in the face
by a blow, soff, yet heavy,
on the side of my cheek.
So tense was my expectation that I jumped
and put my hand to my sword.
The blow was repeated a dozen times
on forehead and cheek.
The dry frost had lasted so long
that it took me a minute to realize
they were raindrops.
At first, they fell slowly,
deliberately,
one by one.
But soon the six drops became sixty;
then six hundred;
then ran themselves together
in a steady spout of water.
It was as if
the hard and consolidated sky
poured itself forth
in one profuse fountain.
I knew then
that Sasha was not coming.
When the dawn broke,
a sight of the most extraordinary nature
met my eyes.
Where, for three months,
there had been solid ice
of such thickness
that it seemed permanent as stone
and on this pavement
a whole gay city rose...
there was now a race
of turbulent yellow waters.
The river had gained its freedom
in the night.
All was riot and confusion.
The river, strewn with icebergs,
was melting.
I n the summer that followed
that winter famous for its disasters,
for the frost,
the floods, the arrival of viruses,
the death of thousands of creatures,
and the collapse of Orlando's hopes,
for they were exiled from Court,
held in deep disgrace
by the greatest names of their time.
I n that summer, therefore, Orlando retired
to their knightly house in the country
and lived there in total solitude.
Orlando was not only suffering
from their breakup with Sasha,
but also from the solitude, shame,
and rejection caused by their difference.
Orlando understood
that their non-binary condition
could not be explained
by the family heritage.
He had to go down into the crypt
where, at the bottom of the coffins,
piled up one on top of the other,
generations of unknown and forgotten
ancestors lay side by side.
They found a strange charm
in the thoughts of death and corruption.
During these melancholic moments,
Orlando saw the skull
as an operator of the mutation.
To look at oneself in a skull
as in a mirror is
to make a deep portrait of oneself
that takes into account the temporal and
almost geological dimension of each life.
The skull is the universal mask.
To write my biography, Virginia,
is also to descend with Orlando
into darkness,
where there are no portraits or witnesses,
to enter the realm of the dead.
To understand that we are
the heirs of an erased history.
It is to learn to honor the dead,
the faceless ones who preceded us.
The Orlandos who have succumbed
to institutional, familiar,
economic, and social violence
are like skeletons lost in the archive.
You too, Virginia, have experienced
violence and depression.
As a child
who was raped by your brother.
As a woman, perhaps non-binary,
who loved other women but could
not publicly assert herself as a lesbian,
and then as an adult,
fragile and institutionalized
by early-20th-century psychiatry.
On March 28, 1941,
terrified by your own
depressive episodes,
by the death of your nephew
in the Spanish Civil War,
and by the fear of war
coming to England,
you filled your pockets with stones
and went into the Ouse River
next to your house.
Your body was not found
until April 15.
Who will tell our history?
It is necessary to survive violence
in order to tell our history.
It is necessary to tell our history
in order to survive violence.
But contrary to what you imagined,
Virginia,
Orlando was not alone.
Who's there?
Is anyone there?
I'm Elios Levy.
I n this film I'll be
Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
Orlando?
I was waiting for you!
I'm Julia.
I n this film I'll be
Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
Sunk for a long time in profound thoughts
as to the value of obscurity...
and the delight of having no name...
but being like a wave which returns
to the deep body of the sea;
thinking how obscurity
rids the mind of the irk
of spite and envy;
how it sets running in the veins the free
waters of generosity and magnanimity;
and allows giving and taking
without thanks offered or praise given;
which must have been the way
all great gender poets lived.
Coccinelle or Marsha P. Johnson
built their bodies and their lives
like others built cathedrals.
For years, I knew
that I was something else,
a little bit Orlando...
but I didn't have the words yet.
I was treated by medicine, but...
the doctors were hardly wiser
than they are now.
They prescribed
rest and exercise,
starvation and nourishment.
They ordered me to...
lie in bed all day
and ride forty miles
between lunch and dinner.
They put me on sedatives and irritants,
Prozac and newt's slobber
on rising,
Diazepam and drafts of peacock's gall
on going to bed.
Happily,
I was of a strong build,
but neither psychology nor medicine
could cure me.
Only reading
and affirming my life drive
could cure me.
I had my first
testosterone shot last Saturday
affer we met.
But a little dose to see
because I don't think
I want to pass for a cis guy
and I think that...
passing for a trans person
would be fine.
At the same time...
it's still...
This freedom scares me.
I n the book, he talks
about having to lose
these masculine clothes will be difficult,
he's going to live... she's going to live
from now on
as a woman with women's clothes
and it's going to be complicated
to live in a patriarchal society.
That stuck with me.
I say to myself that...
whether you're a man,
non-binary, woman or trans,
you can identify with these words.
They'll remain forever modern.
It's very scary
that we probably have
privileges to lose.
I n me were feelings
of melancholy and indolence...
ardor and passion for solitude...
Before being who I am now,
I went through very depressive passages.
I even thought about death.
I have a rage that I want to share,
an inner rage,
and I see so many friends around me
who don't feel...
free.
Even if I am angry, sometimes,
I'm also very happy to share it
because it is a joy,
a joy to be able to tell your friends,
to be able to say who you are...
and above all...
not to be afraid, even if it is difficult.
Years passed, even if Orlando
wanted to hide in their castle,
they were besieged
by hate messages on their accounts.
I n order to escape the court life
and the digital harassment,
they asked King Charles to send them
as far away as possible.
Here hides
Ambition,
the harridan,
Hatred,
the witch,
and Desire of Fame,
the strumpet.
Weapon Store of the East Station
Hello.
I'm Orlando.
I was appointed extraordinary ambassador
in Constantinople by King Charles.
It seems I can find
the attributes of masculinity here.
I have a few things to offer you.
There you are.
- Anything else?
- Of course.
- Still not?
- No.
Orlando began to understand
what being a man
in a patriarchal society meant:
not just having the right
to use violence,
but rather having
the obligation to do so.
I'll take it.
On the other hand,
in a patriarchal society,
becoming a woman
means to be disarmed.
Hello.
- I'm just looking, thanks.
- Go ahead.
Reading a manuscript of "Orlando"
in the New York Public Library,
I learn that you, Virginia, had included
yourself in your book as a character,
Volumia Fox.
I'd like to buy this fox.
Sorry, it's not for sale.
What if I trade it for this?
Is it authentic?
From the 18th century?
1741, to be precise.
- With pleasure.
- OK?
Then you removed that part,
and your character disappeared.
I n all stories
there are hidden characters
and ghosts that remain unseen.
I like your pseudonym, Volumia Fox.
It's a really great drag queen name.
Then, one summer day,
Orlando finally arrived in Constantinople.
Where historians would have liked to solve
the mystery of their transition,
they found a hole in the manuscript.
I n short, we have done our best
to compose a meager summary
from the blackened fragments
that remain.
But offen we have found it necessary
to speculate, to suppose,
even to have recourse
to the imagination.
Constantinople will be for Orlando
the magical place of all discoveries.
But the most important thing
is that you, Virginia,
have decided that Orlando's transition
will take place here.
As soon as they arrived, Orlando was
perfumed, curled and "anointed"
according to the custom,
their body transformed
into a representative of imperial power.
Most importantly, their face was whitened.
I n the mid-17th century, before the
concept of race was invented in the West,
colonial governors invented
whiteness through makeup
to differentiate between the skin
of the dominant and of the subaltern.
Why does gender change
take place in the colony?
You, Virginia,
knew this colonial trip well:
your mother, Julia Jackson, was born
in Calcutta into a family of doctors
working for the East India Company.
And your husband, Leonard Woolf,
had been a cadet,
then an administrative officer
for the British Empire in Ceylon.
Perhaps that's why you didn't imagine
an Orlando who perceives the colonial city
as a totally foreign place,
but rather as a mirror place
where they understand
their misbegotten condition.
I don't think the people of these lands
I'm supposed to govern
are different from me.
I wonder whether, in the Crusades,
one of my ancestors had taken up
with a Circassian peasant woman.
Maybe he obtained her sexual favors
in exchange for something.
Maybe he forced her.
I think it possible.
I am not white.
I am the child of this colonial journey
and of this rape.
Orlando's mutation
does not start with a sex change.
There are four metamorphoses.
The first two are poetry and love.
The third one,
induced by the exile from his own culture,
is the process of creolization.
Only affer that,
the fourth metamorphosis takes place.
Orlando is ready for their gender change.
I'm Amir Baylly. In this film
I'll be Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
After two years as ambassador,
King Charles gave me the highest peerage.
The envious said it was because
I had the finest legs in England.
Well, I think it was my merits,
not my legs.
My journey to Constantinople
was, at first, full of apprehension.
I was afraid I'd lose everything:
especially my family,
not really my friends,
more the world in general.
And it turned out a lot better
than expected, in the end.
I grew up with just my mother,
who's French.
My father is Rwandan.
So I didn't have any contact
with that side of the family
before I was 17 or 18.
They still knew me
before I transitioned.
But when I had to tell them
what I was going to do,
they took it very well.
It tends to surprise people
because you imagine African families
or non-Western families
as being more closed-minded
about issues
such as gender and sexuality.
But it's not the case. It's a stereotype,
and it depends on the people.
I started at a pretty young age.
I'm 23, so I started when I was 20.
It wasn't really a break
with the person I was before.
It was more of a continuation
of who I am and who I'd become.
People spread rumors about me.
Shepherds,
bringing their goats to market,
said they'd seen me praying
on a mountaintop.
But I was actually
just reciting a poem aloud
because I like to chant
when I'm alone.
I've become the idol of many women...
and certain men.
Some fall in love
without having spoken to me or seen me.
When they think of me, they imagine
a noble gentleman in silk stockings
as the sun sets over Constantinople.
But in fact,
I spent most of my time alone.
Orlando spent their days
wandering and reading,
accompanied by their beloved dog.
Everyone thought they were the same,
but somewhere inside them,
the metamorphosis had already begun.
One day, Duke Orlando,
as we must call them from now on,
was found, by their secretaries
and their dog, deeply asleep.
At first, nothing was suspected,
because the evening had been very tiring.
But the next day,
Orlando was still sleeping.
And so the doctors were called.
Is he alive?
He's alive, he's alive!
We are Pierre and Gilles.
I n this film we'll be
Orlando's doctors.
On the seventh day
of this lethargy,
the first shot
of a bloody insurrection broke out.
The people were rising
against the sultan.
The insurgents put
all the foreigners to the sword.
But thinking that Orlando was dead,
they abandoned them in their palace.
A normative biographer would have wanted
to write the end word on the screen.
Saying Orlando died,
they put them in the ground.
But this is not how things happened.
Three goddesses
came out of the mist of the night
and rescued Orlando from death.
I'm Tristana. I n this film
I'll be the goddess of hormones.
And I'm Le Filip. In this film
I'll be the goddess of gender fucking.
And I'm Miss Drinks. I n this film
I'll be the goddess of insurrection.
Truth, truth, truth!
Orlando had become a woman.
No need to deny it.
But for the rest,
they remained the same Orlando.
They might have changed sex
and destiny.
But not personality.
It seems that the metamorphosis
was painless and perfect.
Many scientists, convinced
that a change of sex would be unnatural,
have gone to great lengths to prove:
1. That Orlando
had always been a woman;
2. That Orlando
had never stopped being a man.
Let biologists and psychologists
argue unnecessarily.
As for us, the facts are enough.
Orlando had changed gender, sex,
and soon sexuality.
I beg the audience to remember
that Orlando was like a child
who comes into possession
of a garden or a toy cabinet.
Their reasoning was not that of women
who were assigned
the female gender at birth
and who perceive the rituals
of patriarchal oppression as natural.
With some of the guineas
left from the sale of a pearl
and with money made from doing
stripteases via webcam in Turkey,
I bought a complete outfit of clothes
women wore then,
and it was in the dress
of a young Englishwoman of rank
that I prepared to return to the castle.
The first year of my transition
was one of the most beautiful periods
of my life.
I remember a time,
between January and June,
when, affer increasing my hormone dosage
every 17 days to 250 milligrams,
it was still not possible for me or others
to know whether my face
was female or male.
Sometimes, as I walked
through the streets of New York,
I would see my reflection
in a shop window
and I would see
how the female face was decomposing
without the male face having yet appeared.
Hormones had begun to undo
one mask of me, but it had not
yet been replaced by another.
I called this period the genderless time.
This was an uncertain time,
but it was also light.
It was as if all relationships
of ownership, inheritance, guilt, and debt
had disappeared with sexual difference.
As the hormonal changes sculpted my body
like a chemical chisel working from within
and I began to use my new name,
I felt how reality
metamorphosed around me.
It wasn't just me
who was changing.
My change was part
of a planetary mutation.
You, Virginia, you knew it.
Orlando's enjoyment of their transition
comes from the decision
to be open to experimentation.
To make their life a work of art.
Now...
I'm a woman.
Never have I seen my skin
look so good.
However...
could I jump overboard...
and swim in this garment?
We'll start again,
we'll start again.
- More trashy.
- OK.
- From the beginning?
- Yes.
"Now, I'm a woman ." See?
Now, I'm a woman.
After Paul's "Action,"
I'll give a sign so you can start talking.
- OK.
- Thanks.
Still rolling.
When you're ready, Paul...
Action!
Orlando would also discover
that there were 1,000 different ways
to be a woman.
Femininity was not an essence,
but rather a practice of becoming.
Lord...
I can't respect men's opinion
of women anymore.
It is monstrous.
I can't even eat by myself.
I understood the problem when Captain
Nicholas Benedict Bartolus,
a sea captain of distinguished aspect,
offered me a slice of corned beef
and said:
"A little of the fat, ma'am?
Let me cut you the tiniest little slice
the size of your fingernail ."
I remember the feeling
of indescribable pleasure
with which I had first seen
a beautiful woman for the first time,
a hundred years ago.
I n the meantime, the ships
that were going to take Orlando to England
were arriving on the Turkish Sea.
I'm Naelle Dariya,
I n this film I'll be
Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
To be trans is to discover the backstage
of sexual and gender difference.
To understand that a society is
a collectively constructed set
and that masculinity and femininity
are political fictions,
which we have learned to perceive as
natural through repetition and violence.
A gender transition is a journey.
It is not a passage between masculinity
and femininity or vice versa,
but rather a journey
into unknown territory.
This unknown land is actually
the society we were born into,
but now experienced
from a different political position.
Transition does not begin during sleep
as an unconscious, passive moment,
but rather in the dream
as an active emergence
of desire in memory.
It is in our imagination
as a force for political transformation
that we start becoming trans.
What?
The sight of my knees
can cause the death of a boy
who no doubt has a wife and family?
So, to be kind,
I should keep them covered up.
A pox on them!
Now I must return to England,
but what will England say
when they see me like this?
Once I set foot on English soil
as a woman,
I'll never be able to crack a man
on the head, or tell him he lies,
or sit among my peers in Parliament,
or wear 72 different medals
on my breast.
My only right as a woman
will be to pour out tea
and ask my lords how they like it.
"Do you take sugar?"
"Do you take cream?"
Your Orlando, Virginia,
went to Turkey as a soldier of the king
and returned, transformed into a woman.
I n 1952,
Orlando was called Christine Jorgensen.
She was like your character,
a soldier who became a woman
and came to the United States
from Denmark.
The first trans women featured on TV
were always portrayed
as Orlando,
stepping off a boat or a plane.
I n the normative narratives
of the lives of Orlandos,
there is this obstinacy
to make trans women arrive from afar.
As if transformation
should always happen abroad.
As if it could never happen here.
As if a vaginoplasty
should necessarily take place
in a parallel world.
As if the operating table
was on the waves or in the clouds.
I n 1958, Orlando was called Coccinelle,
and she arrived in France
affer passing through a clinic in Morocco.
I didn't expect that.
I cannot play the theater
of heterosexuality either.
I'm not a man...
I'm not just a woman...
I'm a trans woman.
I know the secrets of both sexes,
their social conventions
and their infirmities.
I'm no longer a boy.
I'm not a woman yet.
I'm not the person I want to be yet.
But the words to describe the gender
of the person I want to be don't exist.
So, they have to be invented.
So, you have to be poetic.
We are poets.
I was a feather blown on the gale.
I kept pitting one sex
against the other
and finding them
as pathetic as each other.
I don't understand why France,
a marvelous country I'm rediscovering...
I don't understand why it won't let
unhappy people get operated on.
People get nose jobs,
why not the rest?
My entire psychology was transformed.
Disappearance of shame,
disappearance of anxiety,
public authorization,
self-recognition,
self-esteem,
disappearance of hatred,
appearance of love...
That is the aim.
Come...
Come.
I am sick to death
of this particular self.
I want another.
I travel the world all year round.
I know 2,000 post-op women.
I don't call them transsexuals.
I say women of the year 2000.
We will soon be the women
of the year 2000.
I always say I'm a trans woman.
I say it with pride. If I were reborn,
I'd want to be the same person.
I discovered sex work, street work.
I saw women die,
girlfriends who fell right next to me,
a car went by, shots were fired,
they fell right next to me,
because of many things:
hatred, transphobia,
many horrible things.
It's what gave me the strength
to leave my home country, Venezuela.
I saw myself dead like many of my friends
who died that year.
I thought that if I stayed,
I wouldn't survive.
I can't change my identity now.
I can see myself in a mirror.
Many people see me and I'm a woman,
but unfortunately,
for institutions, hospitals, banks,
I'm a victim of transphobia
because when I hand over my I D,
they don't see the person.
The state is responsible
for sex workers' insecurity
After returning
to England as a woman
who had lost their possessions
and legal identity,
Orlando, now stateless
and accompanied only by their dog,
the only one who still recognized them,
began an endless wandering for centuries.
Come on, I'll give you...
Yes, I will.
I know, I know. Here, darling.
Hang on. Walk on 'cause it's too much.
Do it nice and easy.
Go on, off you go, darling.
You be careful.
Take it easy.
I'm Jenny Bel'Air.
I n this film I'll be
Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
I'm Rilke. In this film I'll be
the dog of Virginia Woolr's Orlando.
Hello, ma'am. How can I help?
I reserved a room
in the name of Mrs. Orlando.
- I ndeed.
- Forgive me...
I just found out that Godard died,
and it's made me so sad.
- Forgive me.
- My condolences.
I can give you Room 503.
Fine. I asked for a room
overlooking the courtyard as I hate noise.
- 503 is fine, then.
- OK. Don't forget I have a dog.
- OK?
- We accept dogs.
Excellent, good.
- Can I have your I D, please?
- Yes, I nearly forgot.
Now, then...
Here is my passport.
Thank you.
Nationality: Planet Earth
Date of hirth: 9 March 1500
Author: Virginia Woolf
Excuse me. I think this must be
your husband's. It's in a man's name.
Do I look married? Look at me.
There's no mistake. Look closely.
I did. I'm sorry,
I can't accept this I D card.
What? I'm Orlando. It's me!
Look, sir or madam, I don't know,
I can't accept this I D card.
I'm not sir or madam, I'm Orlando!
So?
Don't call me sir. Do I look like a man?
I'm not a man, you're mistaken.
It's my real passport. Look at the photo.
I saw it, but I can't accept
an I D card that isn't valid.
I have to ask you
to leave the hotel.
You do that to me?
You damn...
Shit!
Identity papers are
administrative prostheses
without which a human body in a binary
society becomes a political outlaw,
without the possibility
of owning money,
without the right to circulate
or be admitted to public institutions.
Life without administrative papers
becomes an endless waiting room.
And it is not by an oak tree
that Orlando went to seek comfort.
They went to the highest authorities
of the republic
to demand their recognition.
When I came back,
I, of course, had no right to anything.
Everything was over.
I had no papers,
everything was taken from me,
as usual.
When I think that society is everything,
society is nothing really.
It takes everything.
And what I ask is immediately,
right away, if I've come here,
respect for myself
and for everyone who looks like me.
Otherwise it's no use.
But society won't be able to kill me.
I'm Emma.
And in this film I'll be
Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
I've already lived for almost 400 years.
I've seen many things.
The colonization of America...
of Africa...
and of Asia
by Europe.
I've seen the extermination
of the first peoples,
the arrival of capitalism,
the rise of industrial production,
the destruction of nature.
They went that far.
I've seen...
the invention of normative heterosexuality
and the nuclear family.
With this belief that as a woman,
if you're not married
or you haven't given birth,
you're useless, you don't exist.
I've seen...
Oh, yes, also the invention of the notion
of transsexuality and inter sexuality
at the end of the 19th century.
With the aim of excluding us
from the human world
and making us look like monsters.
I've also seen...
the arrival of a new generation
that wanted to live like me,
without law, without God,
without gender.
But despite this growing visibility
of transgender and non-binary people,
I am in political limbo.
Without papers.
Without a real existence.
Why?
Is it so complicated
to give us new papers?
Why
does someone else, a judge,
a psychiatrist,
claim to know more than me
about my identity?
To deny our identity
is to erase us from society.
We don't exist.
It's to refuse we have rights
like others, like binary people.
But I...
I want to give myself this identity.
But I'll recognize myself.
I don't need this paper.
I'll have it one day.
But I give myself this paper, me.
I will be Emma, Orlando,
and I'll walk toward life.
Brave, happy...
I will be proud and joytul...
to be here...
with you.
I'll recognize myself
and I'll love myself.
I'm Koriangelis Brawns.
I n this film I'll be
Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
But what is an identity document
if not a piece of paper
written and printed,
a small booklet
containing a political fiction?
Shared fictions
that we have collectively constructed
and that we forget
we can question, modify, change.
Or, to put it another way, fictions
that we can lay on an operating table.
Sometimes they're really difficult.
But... we're here!
It's a big operation.
Historically, trans people have been seen
as bodies that require medical surgery
to restore continuity
between anatomy and gender.
Me too, I have been
on this operating table.
Where did you get the idea,
Virginia, of a character
who changes sex
in the middle of the novel?
Some say it was the desire
to imagine that Vita, your lover,
would not lose her inheritance rights
because she was a woman.
But the idea of a trans character,
in 1928, was not simply a literary utopia.
When you wrote Orlando, there were
already people in Europe and the U .S.
who did not identify with the gender
they had been assigned at birth
and wanted to change it.
Between 1900 and 1920, the first
sex change operations hit the news.
Then, with the discovery
of synthetic hormones,
some people began experimenting
with producing a new trans body
at the Magnus Hirschfeld I nstitute
of Sexology in Berlin.
You, Virginia, intrepid reader,
could not ignore these discourses.
Who is operated on when our bodies lie on
the operating tables of the Binary Empire?
Our bodies are discursive artifacts,
assemblages of fiction and flesh.
To operate is to intervene
not only in anatomy,
but to cut into political fiction.
I n your Orlando, you included
images of Vita and her ancestors.
But the real Orlandos of history
remained invisible.
We never operate on individual bodies.
We operate on the political history.
It is the regime of sexual difference
we have to operate on.
There are so many historical discourses
on which we must intervene.
That's me,
a non-binary 5-year-old Orlando
in the Spanish carnival,
accompanied by the fictions
of normative femininity and masculinity.
I'm Eleonore. In this film
I'll be Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
What have we done with the trans
and non-binary children that we were?
Christine Jorgensen,
the first trans woman in the media,
was a film editor before she lost her job
when she became a woman.
She said that to be trans
was to have the possibility
to edit the film of her life differently.
I'm Lilie. I n this film
I'll be Orlando.
Of Virginia Woolf.
- Virginia Woolf.
- Virginia Woolf!
I was told not to say it.
Cut!
And it is for the right to edit our lives
that we are still fighting today.
I'm Artur. In this film
I'll play Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
I'm a trans girl.
I live in Arroyo de Sansilv.
Over the last four years,
I was on a very important path,
the path to my happiness.
But it's still necessary to remember
I have the right to be called
how I feel.
Four years later,
mistakes over my name
are a bit strange,
as if anyone could doubt
I'm a trans girl.
Your Orlandos are still there.
Now, for the first time, they start
to speak up and to exist by themselves.
To choose their name
and to choose their own life.
The world to come
belongs to the new Orlandos.
They will edit the film of History.
It is for them that you wrote your book,
even without knowing it,
and that I made this film.
But of all I have to say today,
the main thing is this:
ladies and gentlemen involved in politics,
continue, despite the threats,
to make laws that recognize
that people are diverse.
Above all, we trans people
have the right to be who we are.
Don't let anyone take away our happiness.
Thank you.
Today...
Wednesday, October 11, 2028,
faced with the collapse
of the patriarchal-colonial regime,
and by the powers given to me
by Virginia Woolf and literature,
I declare
the abolition of the assignment
of sexual difference at birth
and its legal
and administrative registration.
Thus,
I grant
planetary, non-binary citizenship to
Orlando Emma.
Orlando Jenny.
- Here's to the judge!
- The judge!
I'm Virginie Despentes. I n this film
I'll be the judge
of Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
Someone once asked me:
"Why don't you write your biography?"
I replied: "Because fucking Virginia Woolf
wrote my biography in 1928."
I'm sorry I said
"fucking" Virginia Woolf.
I said it
with tenderness and admiration
because your writing seemed
impossible to surpass.
But also,
I say it with rage
because you represented us trans people
as aristocrats in colonial England,
Who, one fine day, wake up
in a woman's body.
You didn't know, perhaps,
this was not how one became trans.
It was much more difficult.
We risk our lives every time.
And I wanted to write to tell you
I am one of your Orlandos.
I am alive. I came out of your fiction.
The contemporary world
is full of Orlandos.
ORLANDO, WH ERE ARE YOU?
We're changing the course of history.
HAVE YOU SEEN ORLANDO?
FROM LOVE TH EY HAD SUFFERED
TH E TORTURES OF THE DAMN ED
So I decided to write a letter to you,
who had written thousands of letters
and received thousands more.
I might as well write you a letter
now you are, in the organic sense, dead,
even though, in inorganic terms,
you have never been as alive as now.
It's one of the things
I've learned from reading you:
life begins before we are born
and, of course, ends long affer we die.
So, just as you wrote my biography
before I was born,
I decided to send you a letter
affer your death.
Dear Virginia,
I'm writing to you
as I think I'm your Orlando.
We should meet.
I feel I'm changing fast, so don't delay.
I'd like to show you
all my metamorphoses and crash tests.
I'm Janis Sahraoui.
I n this film I'll be
Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
I love my name.
It is very important to me and...
My mother gave it to me.
I'm very attached to her.
I lost my mother
when I was a child, at 7.
And it's something I really want to keep
from her. It's something that's...
important to me,
because I know she chose my name.
I like the way it sounds.
There is something very musical
and even very non-binary, in fact.
I'm Oscar Rosza Miller.
I n this film I'll be
Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
Orlando was a name friends wanted
to give me when I started
my gender transition.
I didn't feel capable
of bearing this name.
Perhaps I was held back by the
aristocratic semblance of the character,
by the English thickness of his blood,
by his pale face and blond curls...
Nothing could be further
from the existence
of the son of a garage owner
and a seamstress
in an anonymous town in the north
of Spain than the life of Orlando,
inspired by your lover
Vita Sackville-West.
Maybe that's why I called myself
Paul and not Orlando.
Would you tell me the story
of Orlando by Virginia Woolf?
Orlando is a young boy, a teenager,
and at the end of the book,
it's a woman in her thirties.
Well, this person changes bodies
in the middle of the book.
Oh, yeah?
We don't know
how long this person will live
because we go through centuries
during the book,
while Orlando is only 30.
It's inspired
by a person who really existed.
Oh, OK.
The girlfriend
of the chick who wrote it.
Turn your face.
- You're a bit of an Orlando.
- Yeah!
You too!
We all have a bit of Orlando in us.
This is the child Orlando.
Now I define myself
as a non-binary person,
but I consider myself changing.
Their style was not similar
to that of men of letters of their time,
nor to that of the women.
There can be no doubt about my sex...
though the fashion of my time
disguises it.
The clothes, my whole corporality is very
important as the way I want to be seen...
it's really not like a man or a woman.
Around the fact
that Orlando is transitioning,
it's not stigmatized in the book...
It's beautiful to see it
like that because...
Actually, this is not the point...
You just let it flow.
It's just a person
who unfolds their life.
To have written this at that time,
it's incredible.
And it's also an extremely feminist book.
It's also a big "fuck you"
to the patriarchy!
He never loses, or she never loses,
the connection to nature
and their love for...
for trees. There's a real sensitivity.
I took my first hormones in a park.
I was in a park in Paris
and I sat down and meditated,
and I was surrounded by nature
next to my house
and it felt good. I said to myself
that I wanted this moment
to be important.
This was the first image
I wanted to keep,
so it's funny to be here.
I love to feel...
beneath all this summer transiency,
the earth's spine beneath me.
I lean against it
for the hard root of the oak tree
is that to me;
it is the back
of a great horse that I ride...
Or the deck of a tumbling ship -
it is anything indeed hard,
for I feel the need of something
which I could attach my floating heart to.
This heart that tugs at my side;
this heart
filled with spiced, amorous gales
every evening
about this time
when I walk out.
I tie it to the oak tree...
and as I lay here,
gradually the flutter
in and about me stills itself;
the little leaves hang.
The deer stops;
the pale summer clouds stay;
my limbs grow heavy
on the ground ;
and I lay so still
that by degrees the deer steps nearer
and the rooks wheel round me
and the swallows dip and circle
and the dragonflies shoot past,
as if all the fertility and amorous
activity of a summer's evening
weaves its web about my body.
My taste is broad, I love flowers,
simple flowers,
the wild have a fascination for me.
I love solitary places,
vast views,
and the charm of feeling
for ever and ever and ever alone.
When I was a child,
I remember
never being able to choose,
and I think
that feeling stayed with me.
I don't want to choose
one thing or another,
I want to be able to make
an explosive mix.
That's always been the case.
I think that this thing
that my parents call "phases,"
or what I like to Cali
passages of my life, are epochs.
Life is not at all like a biography.
It is not a series of episodes
or sentimental adventures
or descriptive scenes
or even the servitude of daily existence.
But it consists
in the metamorphosis of oneself,
letting oneself be transformed by time,
becoming not only other,
but others.
I n your novel,
at certain moments in the story,
driven by extreme suffering,
Orlando sleeps for a week,
a month, a year...
That is how Orlando
crosses the centuries.
I remember reading your novel
before I knew
that sex change really existed,
or at least before I met someone
who had gone through it
when I was 14 or 15.
I n your book, Orlando's sex change
happens in his sleep.
I thought that if it happened to Orlando,
maybe it could also happen to me.
Then sleep became for me
the magical realm in which
the gender transition took place.
Perhaps this explains
why I sleep so much and so well.
That's why nights have become
silent waiting rooms
in which, immersed in my thoughts,
I wait for the change to take place.
I imagined the beds as a dreamlike,
painless operating table
where my lying body
was recoded.
I believed
sleep could act on the body
like a chemical process
acts on an element.
I thought sleep was like freezing,
or like evaporation:
a process that induces a change in form
but not in meaning.
There are parts of Orlando's life,
dear Virginia, that you forgot to tell.
So I have to tell you about them
if I am to make their biography,
that is to say, my biography.
You write about the meeting
of Orlando and Queen Elizabeth
as a confrontation between Orlando's
free, poetic and still-childish spirit
and the violence of the imperial power.
But you forgot to mention
a second, equally important confrontation.
From the 19th century on, those who,
like Orlando, cross gender boundaries
are confronted
with the power of psychiatry.
Look at your Orlandos...
They did not live
as aristocrats or poets.
They were reduced
to being patients of psychiatry.
You also knew a lot about psychiatry.
You were like us, asylum fodder.
Not as a trans person, or as a lesbian
(you were in the closet about that),
but as a great melancholic.
Look, that one is me.
I too ended up in a psychiatrist's office
for the first time at 14,
when my parents realized that I was...
They used to say
"too masculine a woman."
Then I had to go back again when I wanted
to get a legal gender change.
That's what you didn't say.
Neither in "Orlando"
nor in "A Room of One's Own ."
You were one of us.
Orlando.
Orlando Kristin, please.
Yes, that's me.
I'm Liz Kristin.
I n this film I'll be
Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
I'm Frdric Pierrot. I n this film
I'll be Dr. Oueen, a psychiatrist.
Please sit down.
Before we start,
I must inform you that there will be
an additional fee of 80 euros,
compared to the rates
covered by the social security.
No checks or credit cards.
Yes, I know.
Very well.
So, you were sent by your mother.
According to her, you persist
in dressing as a girl and talking
about yourself in the feminine.
Yes, I had a fight with her.
The question I ask myself is:
How and for what reason
did you believe yourself...
How can I put it?
Authorized
to wear a skirt as a young man?
I am not a man.
So you're a woman?
I wouldn't exactly say that either.
But what is really your sex?
There's no doubt about my sex,
though the fashion of my time
disguises it.
Would you say
your father is masculine?
Yes, very masculine.
He went on the Crusades
and brought back a lot of Moorish heads.
I ndeed.
So he is not the problem,
you do not identify with him?
No.
So you have a female identification.
You think... you feel
confined,
trapped, locked up
in your male body, right?
What an obsession with the binary.
No, I am...
a living body
trapped in a normative regime.
Sorry. I don't understand.
I will try to ask you
a more direct question.
Do you hate your sexual organs,
for example, your penis?
No, I have a female penis
and I have no problem with that.
A female penis...?
I nteresting...
But you must be talking about a fantasy,
not a biological reality.
Is your sperm female?
Of course.
Organs and body fluids
are neither male nor female.
The discourse of sexual binarism
is an invention of modernity.
Well, do you offen have
these kinds of ideas, or thoughts?
When reading poetry...
I think I suffer from...
literature-sickness.
Poetry...?
Fascinating.
Well, we'll look at all that in detail.
Follow me.
Does anyone want one?
I do.
Yes, I do.
I'm waiting for a prescription.
So be careful what you say to him,
because Dr. Queen is very strict.
If you tell him
you're non-binary,
he'll send you home
with a kick in the ass
and no pills.
You have to tell him
that you hate your genitals
and you want to be a straight woman.
But I don't!
- Do you want your pills or not?
- Yes.
So shut your mouth
and act like a good girl.
You must be freaking out, Virginia,
seeing your Orlandos
exchanging hormones.
You know, in the 20th century,
just affer you died,
hormones started to be marketed
by the pharmacological industry,
but not just for us
trans people,
but mostly for the birth control pill.
The hormones for trans women and
those for the pill are exactly the same.
The only difference is
that, for cis heterosexual women,
the prescription is automatic,
whereas, for trans women,
it depends on a psychiatric diagnosis.
Anyone want some T?
Well, yeah, I do.
I've waited two months
for my prescription.
- Shall I give you an injection?
- Yeah.
- A little 150?
- Yeah.
OK...
Drop your pants, my little darling.
OK?
Here goes...
Look, bitch, this little shit
Do you want to know what's in it?
Your Liberationi
Don't let Freud, don't let Lacan
Get in your dreams and your mind fuck
Who owns your history?
God? The state? Psychiatry? The law?
The corporations?
Anyone hut youi
It's time to bite
You might be synthetic, but not apologetic
You are not the doctor's bitch
You might be synthetic, but not apologetic
You are not the doctor's bitch
Their categories are pathetic
You are much more poetic
Prosthetic but magnetic
You are not the doctor's bitch
Look, Virginia
What we have become!
Do you want to come with us?
Pharmacoliberation
They say you are dysphoric
But it's just metaphoric
They protect their privileges
They are scared of beauty
I am your Orlando, Virginia
Do you really think
that I could ever, ever live like this?
Pharmacoliberation
Faced with the task
of telling my biography,
I find myself in the position you were in
when you wanted to do Orlando's biography.
How to film the biography
of a trans person today?
Or to put it another way,
how to construct an Orlandoesque life,
a life of a gender poet in the midst
of a binary and normative society?
I agree with you,
fiction is not opposed to truth,
and every individual life
is a collective history.
I'm Ruben Rizza. I n this film
I'll be Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
The Great Frost was the most severe
that has ever visited these islands.
Birds froze in midair
and fell like stones to the ground.
The mortality among sheep
and cattle was enormous.
Corpses froze
and could not be drawn from the sheets.
But while the country people
suffered the extremity of want,
and all trade was at a standstill,
London enjoyed a carnival
of the utmost brilliancy.
Your "Orlando," Virginia, is a book
about the metamorphosis of subjectivity,
not only about sex change.
The first revolutionary metamorphosis
is poetry,
the possibility of changing
the names of all things,
including the proper name.
The second and most profound
metamorphosis is love.
That's why Orlando falls in love
with the arrival of the Great Frost
and the transformation
of the state of water,
the most essential of the elements,
into ice.
Your book was also a love letter to Vita,
who was your lover for some months.
When you met her,
she was a successful writer,
and you, too experimental,
were her editor.
For you, she was elusive.
Rich heiress
of an aristocratic lineage
and married woman
with multiple lesbian adventures,
she would break your girly heart.
Poetic justice, "Orlando" would become
your first great literary success
and a scandalous book
that Vita's family would try to ban.
At night, the carnival
was at its merriest.
The moon and stars blazed
with the hard fixity of diamonds,
and to the fine music
of flute and trumpet,
the courtiers danced.
I had just brought my feet together
when I beheld, coming from the pavilion
of the Muscovite Embassy,
a figure,
which, whether boy's or woman's,
for the loose tunic and Russian trousers
disguised the sex,
filled me with the highest curiosity.
The person, whatever the sex,
was of medium height,
very slenderly fashioned
and dressed in oyster-colored velvet,
trimmed with unfamiliar green fur.
When the boy,
for alas, a boy it must be -
no woman could skate
with such speed and vigor -
swept almost on tiptoe past me,
I was ready
to tear my hair with vexation.
If the stranger was a man,
all embraces were out of the question.
They came closer.
Legs, hands, carriage were a boy's,
but no boy ever had a mouth like that;
no boy had such a chest;
no boy had eyes which looked
as if fished from the seabed.
Finally, coming to a stop
and sweeping a curtsy
with the utmost grace to the King,
who was shuffling past, they stopped.
They were not a handsbreadth off.
I contemplated them, I trembled,
I was hot, then cold,
I burned to leap
in the burning breaths of the summer,
to crush acorns,
to embrace chains and paddles.
I decided to name him or her
Sasha
affer a white fox I had as a child.
I'm Castiel Emery. I n this film
I'll be Sasha
from Virginia WoolFs "Orlando."
Growing up, I had a lot of dysphoria...
But I wasn't sure if it was
gender dysphoria or if it was
just that I didn't like my body,
like most teenagers.
I was 7 years old.
As a child, I didn't really understand,
because I think I wasn't mature enough
to comprehend
what was happening to me.
But I was always in the in-between,
whether it was in my clothes,
my toys, my friendships, everything,
I was always in-between.
Even I felt in-between because
I was told "You're a girl,"
so I thought "I'm a girl"...
but I thought: "I'm not totally a girl
but I don't know what else."
No one ever said to me:
"Yes, you have gender dysphoria.
I'm diagnosing you
as transgender, transsexual."
On the contrary,
I've had shrinks tell me:
"No, it's just a phase, you're a woman,
I know that."
I started to feel bad about myself,
I couldn't look at myself in the mirror,
I couldn't stand myself.
I was very angry,
but we didn't know why.
So, I saw several specialists,
psychologists, psychiatrists.
At first, they told me it was because
of my weight. I was an overweight child.
They said: "Hide the cookies,
your child will get better."
I've been trying
to take hormones since 2017
and I still can't. I tried to go
through the public health sector.
But they thought
I was too feminine in my clothing style,
because I wear jewelry,
I'm not a man.
I started the puberty blocker treatment
when I was 11
because I started my female puberty,
and it was really painful
because I was seeing my body change,
like absolutely... I wanted the opposite.
I saw I was getting breasts and hips
and I didn't want that.
So I was put on a hormone blocker
treatment for three years.
I started testosterone
in July, so eight months ago.
The top surgery really liberated me.
It let me play more
with my clothing style,
and with my way of being, in fact.
It opened something up.
I think the hormones will have
exactly the same effect.
So I think it'll have
even more of an effect.
I was so happy!
It was everything I wanted for 4-5 years.
I dreamed of it every night.
At the beginning of my transition,
I had the impression
that I had to prove my masculinity,
so I did everything
to be extremely male:
with very dark clothes,
I walked in a caricatured way,
rolling my shoulders like that,
I spoke with a very deep voice,
I had an angry look
to have a very masculine appearance.
And in fact, affer about a year -
I did it for a year -
I realized
it was ridiculous because...
masculinity can come
in many different forms.
I still have a long way to go
because I'm still young, I'm only 15,
but it's true that I've already had
a great journey with masculinity.
I still have dysphoria
about other things...
Yes! But top surgery has helped me
so much. Sometimes I see I don't feel well
and I just remember
that I had top surgery,
I run a hand over my chest or see myself
in a T-shirt, it changes everything.
Today I define myself as a trans boy
and not just as a boy.
It's true that a lot of people ask me:
"Why don't you just say
you're a boy?"
But when I just present myself as a boy,
I erase all that I lived
as a trans person and...
It deletes a part of my history,
so I prefer to present myself
as a trans boy.
I feel that, in our society today,
there is a lot of emphasis on love...
on romantic love,
for a couple, two people, exclusivity,
leading to a future
where you live together, with children,
and that's not at all what attracts me.
It was with a person called Sasha
who I met in a demonstration.
And it's true that it was weird because...
when I was younger,
a year or two ago,
everything to do with the other
and above all, with love...
I had the impression that as long as
I hadn't finished my transition,
and wasn't at ease with myself,
it wasn't a good idea
to want to be with someone else...
because I wouldn't be mature enough
within myself
and I wouldn't have the right
to do that. But I totally do.
And on top of that,
Sasha, who is also a trans boy,
made me... feel understood very quickly.
I felt supported very quickly
by a person I didn't know.
It was one of the first times.
Three girls were hitting on me -
Clorinda, Favilla, and Euphrosyne -
all very feminine,
very binary, very straight...
which I'm not.
All would have made perfect wives
for the nobleman I was supposed to be,
but I wasn't interested in them.
Lawyers were already doing
marriage contracts
with Lady Margaret,
then came the Great Frost.
Like Orlando, I too fell in love
for the first time on a snowy day.
I kissed a girl in the cold,
the warmth of her mouth entered mine.
I have never loved anyone
like I love you.
You are snow,
cream,
marble,
cherries,
you are alabaster,
golden wire
and none of these.
You are an olive tree
and a fox in the snow,
you are a melon, a pinecone,
you are spring,
you are an emerald,
you are the waves of the sea
seen from a cliFop,
you are the sun on a green hill
which is yet clouded.
But you noticed
that I am neither a boy nor a girl.
Yes.
You're like nothing I've ever met before,
and that's why I love you.
You know that...
if I stay here,
I'll have to marry Lady Margaret,
so...
let's leave together.
Will you run away with me?
Yes, yes.
I'll come to meet you
tomorrow at midnight.
It will be the day of my life.
Long before midnight,
I was already waiting...
listening for the slightest step,
speculating on every sound.
I was waiting for Sasha to come alone,
in her cloak and trousers,
booted like a man.
Suddenly I was struck in the face
by a blow, soff, yet heavy,
on the side of my cheek.
So tense was my expectation that I jumped
and put my hand to my sword.
The blow was repeated a dozen times
on forehead and cheek.
The dry frost had lasted so long
that it took me a minute to realize
they were raindrops.
At first, they fell slowly,
deliberately,
one by one.
But soon the six drops became sixty;
then six hundred;
then ran themselves together
in a steady spout of water.
It was as if
the hard and consolidated sky
poured itself forth
in one profuse fountain.
I knew then
that Sasha was not coming.
When the dawn broke,
a sight of the most extraordinary nature
met my eyes.
Where, for three months,
there had been solid ice
of such thickness
that it seemed permanent as stone
and on this pavement
a whole gay city rose...
there was now a race
of turbulent yellow waters.
The river had gained its freedom
in the night.
All was riot and confusion.
The river, strewn with icebergs,
was melting.
I n the summer that followed
that winter famous for its disasters,
for the frost,
the floods, the arrival of viruses,
the death of thousands of creatures,
and the collapse of Orlando's hopes,
for they were exiled from Court,
held in deep disgrace
by the greatest names of their time.
I n that summer, therefore, Orlando retired
to their knightly house in the country
and lived there in total solitude.
Orlando was not only suffering
from their breakup with Sasha,
but also from the solitude, shame,
and rejection caused by their difference.
Orlando understood
that their non-binary condition
could not be explained
by the family heritage.
He had to go down into the crypt
where, at the bottom of the coffins,
piled up one on top of the other,
generations of unknown and forgotten
ancestors lay side by side.
They found a strange charm
in the thoughts of death and corruption.
During these melancholic moments,
Orlando saw the skull
as an operator of the mutation.
To look at oneself in a skull
as in a mirror is
to make a deep portrait of oneself
that takes into account the temporal and
almost geological dimension of each life.
The skull is the universal mask.
To write my biography, Virginia,
is also to descend with Orlando
into darkness,
where there are no portraits or witnesses,
to enter the realm of the dead.
To understand that we are
the heirs of an erased history.
It is to learn to honor the dead,
the faceless ones who preceded us.
The Orlandos who have succumbed
to institutional, familiar,
economic, and social violence
are like skeletons lost in the archive.
You too, Virginia, have experienced
violence and depression.
As a child
who was raped by your brother.
As a woman, perhaps non-binary,
who loved other women but could
not publicly assert herself as a lesbian,
and then as an adult,
fragile and institutionalized
by early-20th-century psychiatry.
On March 28, 1941,
terrified by your own
depressive episodes,
by the death of your nephew
in the Spanish Civil War,
and by the fear of war
coming to England,
you filled your pockets with stones
and went into the Ouse River
next to your house.
Your body was not found
until April 15.
Who will tell our history?
It is necessary to survive violence
in order to tell our history.
It is necessary to tell our history
in order to survive violence.
But contrary to what you imagined,
Virginia,
Orlando was not alone.
Who's there?
Is anyone there?
I'm Elios Levy.
I n this film I'll be
Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
Orlando?
I was waiting for you!
I'm Julia.
I n this film I'll be
Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
Sunk for a long time in profound thoughts
as to the value of obscurity...
and the delight of having no name...
but being like a wave which returns
to the deep body of the sea;
thinking how obscurity
rids the mind of the irk
of spite and envy;
how it sets running in the veins the free
waters of generosity and magnanimity;
and allows giving and taking
without thanks offered or praise given;
which must have been the way
all great gender poets lived.
Coccinelle or Marsha P. Johnson
built their bodies and their lives
like others built cathedrals.
For years, I knew
that I was something else,
a little bit Orlando...
but I didn't have the words yet.
I was treated by medicine, but...
the doctors were hardly wiser
than they are now.
They prescribed
rest and exercise,
starvation and nourishment.
They ordered me to...
lie in bed all day
and ride forty miles
between lunch and dinner.
They put me on sedatives and irritants,
Prozac and newt's slobber
on rising,
Diazepam and drafts of peacock's gall
on going to bed.
Happily,
I was of a strong build,
but neither psychology nor medicine
could cure me.
Only reading
and affirming my life drive
could cure me.
I had my first
testosterone shot last Saturday
affer we met.
But a little dose to see
because I don't think
I want to pass for a cis guy
and I think that...
passing for a trans person
would be fine.
At the same time...
it's still...
This freedom scares me.
I n the book, he talks
about having to lose
these masculine clothes will be difficult,
he's going to live... she's going to live
from now on
as a woman with women's clothes
and it's going to be complicated
to live in a patriarchal society.
That stuck with me.
I say to myself that...
whether you're a man,
non-binary, woman or trans,
you can identify with these words.
They'll remain forever modern.
It's very scary
that we probably have
privileges to lose.
I n me were feelings
of melancholy and indolence...
ardor and passion for solitude...
Before being who I am now,
I went through very depressive passages.
I even thought about death.
I have a rage that I want to share,
an inner rage,
and I see so many friends around me
who don't feel...
free.
Even if I am angry, sometimes,
I'm also very happy to share it
because it is a joy,
a joy to be able to tell your friends,
to be able to say who you are...
and above all...
not to be afraid, even if it is difficult.
Years passed, even if Orlando
wanted to hide in their castle,
they were besieged
by hate messages on their accounts.
I n order to escape the court life
and the digital harassment,
they asked King Charles to send them
as far away as possible.
Here hides
Ambition,
the harridan,
Hatred,
the witch,
and Desire of Fame,
the strumpet.
Weapon Store of the East Station
Hello.
I'm Orlando.
I was appointed extraordinary ambassador
in Constantinople by King Charles.
It seems I can find
the attributes of masculinity here.
I have a few things to offer you.
There you are.
- Anything else?
- Of course.
- Still not?
- No.
Orlando began to understand
what being a man
in a patriarchal society meant:
not just having the right
to use violence,
but rather having
the obligation to do so.
I'll take it.
On the other hand,
in a patriarchal society,
becoming a woman
means to be disarmed.
Hello.
- I'm just looking, thanks.
- Go ahead.
Reading a manuscript of "Orlando"
in the New York Public Library,
I learn that you, Virginia, had included
yourself in your book as a character,
Volumia Fox.
I'd like to buy this fox.
Sorry, it's not for sale.
What if I trade it for this?
Is it authentic?
From the 18th century?
1741, to be precise.
- With pleasure.
- OK?
Then you removed that part,
and your character disappeared.
I n all stories
there are hidden characters
and ghosts that remain unseen.
I like your pseudonym, Volumia Fox.
It's a really great drag queen name.
Then, one summer day,
Orlando finally arrived in Constantinople.
Where historians would have liked to solve
the mystery of their transition,
they found a hole in the manuscript.
I n short, we have done our best
to compose a meager summary
from the blackened fragments
that remain.
But offen we have found it necessary
to speculate, to suppose,
even to have recourse
to the imagination.
Constantinople will be for Orlando
the magical place of all discoveries.
But the most important thing
is that you, Virginia,
have decided that Orlando's transition
will take place here.
As soon as they arrived, Orlando was
perfumed, curled and "anointed"
according to the custom,
their body transformed
into a representative of imperial power.
Most importantly, their face was whitened.
I n the mid-17th century, before the
concept of race was invented in the West,
colonial governors invented
whiteness through makeup
to differentiate between the skin
of the dominant and of the subaltern.
Why does gender change
take place in the colony?
You, Virginia,
knew this colonial trip well:
your mother, Julia Jackson, was born
in Calcutta into a family of doctors
working for the East India Company.
And your husband, Leonard Woolf,
had been a cadet,
then an administrative officer
for the British Empire in Ceylon.
Perhaps that's why you didn't imagine
an Orlando who perceives the colonial city
as a totally foreign place,
but rather as a mirror place
where they understand
their misbegotten condition.
I don't think the people of these lands
I'm supposed to govern
are different from me.
I wonder whether, in the Crusades,
one of my ancestors had taken up
with a Circassian peasant woman.
Maybe he obtained her sexual favors
in exchange for something.
Maybe he forced her.
I think it possible.
I am not white.
I am the child of this colonial journey
and of this rape.
Orlando's mutation
does not start with a sex change.
There are four metamorphoses.
The first two are poetry and love.
The third one,
induced by the exile from his own culture,
is the process of creolization.
Only affer that,
the fourth metamorphosis takes place.
Orlando is ready for their gender change.
I'm Amir Baylly. In this film
I'll be Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
After two years as ambassador,
King Charles gave me the highest peerage.
The envious said it was because
I had the finest legs in England.
Well, I think it was my merits,
not my legs.
My journey to Constantinople
was, at first, full of apprehension.
I was afraid I'd lose everything:
especially my family,
not really my friends,
more the world in general.
And it turned out a lot better
than expected, in the end.
I grew up with just my mother,
who's French.
My father is Rwandan.
So I didn't have any contact
with that side of the family
before I was 17 or 18.
They still knew me
before I transitioned.
But when I had to tell them
what I was going to do,
they took it very well.
It tends to surprise people
because you imagine African families
or non-Western families
as being more closed-minded
about issues
such as gender and sexuality.
But it's not the case. It's a stereotype,
and it depends on the people.
I started at a pretty young age.
I'm 23, so I started when I was 20.
It wasn't really a break
with the person I was before.
It was more of a continuation
of who I am and who I'd become.
People spread rumors about me.
Shepherds,
bringing their goats to market,
said they'd seen me praying
on a mountaintop.
But I was actually
just reciting a poem aloud
because I like to chant
when I'm alone.
I've become the idol of many women...
and certain men.
Some fall in love
without having spoken to me or seen me.
When they think of me, they imagine
a noble gentleman in silk stockings
as the sun sets over Constantinople.
But in fact,
I spent most of my time alone.
Orlando spent their days
wandering and reading,
accompanied by their beloved dog.
Everyone thought they were the same,
but somewhere inside them,
the metamorphosis had already begun.
One day, Duke Orlando,
as we must call them from now on,
was found, by their secretaries
and their dog, deeply asleep.
At first, nothing was suspected,
because the evening had been very tiring.
But the next day,
Orlando was still sleeping.
And so the doctors were called.
Is he alive?
He's alive, he's alive!
We are Pierre and Gilles.
I n this film we'll be
Orlando's doctors.
On the seventh day
of this lethargy,
the first shot
of a bloody insurrection broke out.
The people were rising
against the sultan.
The insurgents put
all the foreigners to the sword.
But thinking that Orlando was dead,
they abandoned them in their palace.
A normative biographer would have wanted
to write the end word on the screen.
Saying Orlando died,
they put them in the ground.
But this is not how things happened.
Three goddesses
came out of the mist of the night
and rescued Orlando from death.
I'm Tristana. I n this film
I'll be the goddess of hormones.
And I'm Le Filip. In this film
I'll be the goddess of gender fucking.
And I'm Miss Drinks. I n this film
I'll be the goddess of insurrection.
Truth, truth, truth!
Orlando had become a woman.
No need to deny it.
But for the rest,
they remained the same Orlando.
They might have changed sex
and destiny.
But not personality.
It seems that the metamorphosis
was painless and perfect.
Many scientists, convinced
that a change of sex would be unnatural,
have gone to great lengths to prove:
1. That Orlando
had always been a woman;
2. That Orlando
had never stopped being a man.
Let biologists and psychologists
argue unnecessarily.
As for us, the facts are enough.
Orlando had changed gender, sex,
and soon sexuality.
I beg the audience to remember
that Orlando was like a child
who comes into possession
of a garden or a toy cabinet.
Their reasoning was not that of women
who were assigned
the female gender at birth
and who perceive the rituals
of patriarchal oppression as natural.
With some of the guineas
left from the sale of a pearl
and with money made from doing
stripteases via webcam in Turkey,
I bought a complete outfit of clothes
women wore then,
and it was in the dress
of a young Englishwoman of rank
that I prepared to return to the castle.
The first year of my transition
was one of the most beautiful periods
of my life.
I remember a time,
between January and June,
when, affer increasing my hormone dosage
every 17 days to 250 milligrams,
it was still not possible for me or others
to know whether my face
was female or male.
Sometimes, as I walked
through the streets of New York,
I would see my reflection
in a shop window
and I would see
how the female face was decomposing
without the male face having yet appeared.
Hormones had begun to undo
one mask of me, but it had not
yet been replaced by another.
I called this period the genderless time.
This was an uncertain time,
but it was also light.
It was as if all relationships
of ownership, inheritance, guilt, and debt
had disappeared with sexual difference.
As the hormonal changes sculpted my body
like a chemical chisel working from within
and I began to use my new name,
I felt how reality
metamorphosed around me.
It wasn't just me
who was changing.
My change was part
of a planetary mutation.
You, Virginia, you knew it.
Orlando's enjoyment of their transition
comes from the decision
to be open to experimentation.
To make their life a work of art.
Now...
I'm a woman.
Never have I seen my skin
look so good.
However...
could I jump overboard...
and swim in this garment?
We'll start again,
we'll start again.
- More trashy.
- OK.
- From the beginning?
- Yes.
"Now, I'm a woman ." See?
Now, I'm a woman.
After Paul's "Action,"
I'll give a sign so you can start talking.
- OK.
- Thanks.
Still rolling.
When you're ready, Paul...
Action!
Orlando would also discover
that there were 1,000 different ways
to be a woman.
Femininity was not an essence,
but rather a practice of becoming.
Lord...
I can't respect men's opinion
of women anymore.
It is monstrous.
I can't even eat by myself.
I understood the problem when Captain
Nicholas Benedict Bartolus,
a sea captain of distinguished aspect,
offered me a slice of corned beef
and said:
"A little of the fat, ma'am?
Let me cut you the tiniest little slice
the size of your fingernail ."
I remember the feeling
of indescribable pleasure
with which I had first seen
a beautiful woman for the first time,
a hundred years ago.
I n the meantime, the ships
that were going to take Orlando to England
were arriving on the Turkish Sea.
I'm Naelle Dariya,
I n this film I'll be
Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
To be trans is to discover the backstage
of sexual and gender difference.
To understand that a society is
a collectively constructed set
and that masculinity and femininity
are political fictions,
which we have learned to perceive as
natural through repetition and violence.
A gender transition is a journey.
It is not a passage between masculinity
and femininity or vice versa,
but rather a journey
into unknown territory.
This unknown land is actually
the society we were born into,
but now experienced
from a different political position.
Transition does not begin during sleep
as an unconscious, passive moment,
but rather in the dream
as an active emergence
of desire in memory.
It is in our imagination
as a force for political transformation
that we start becoming trans.
What?
The sight of my knees
can cause the death of a boy
who no doubt has a wife and family?
So, to be kind,
I should keep them covered up.
A pox on them!
Now I must return to England,
but what will England say
when they see me like this?
Once I set foot on English soil
as a woman,
I'll never be able to crack a man
on the head, or tell him he lies,
or sit among my peers in Parliament,
or wear 72 different medals
on my breast.
My only right as a woman
will be to pour out tea
and ask my lords how they like it.
"Do you take sugar?"
"Do you take cream?"
Your Orlando, Virginia,
went to Turkey as a soldier of the king
and returned, transformed into a woman.
I n 1952,
Orlando was called Christine Jorgensen.
She was like your character,
a soldier who became a woman
and came to the United States
from Denmark.
The first trans women featured on TV
were always portrayed
as Orlando,
stepping off a boat or a plane.
I n the normative narratives
of the lives of Orlandos,
there is this obstinacy
to make trans women arrive from afar.
As if transformation
should always happen abroad.
As if it could never happen here.
As if a vaginoplasty
should necessarily take place
in a parallel world.
As if the operating table
was on the waves or in the clouds.
I n 1958, Orlando was called Coccinelle,
and she arrived in France
affer passing through a clinic in Morocco.
I didn't expect that.
I cannot play the theater
of heterosexuality either.
I'm not a man...
I'm not just a woman...
I'm a trans woman.
I know the secrets of both sexes,
their social conventions
and their infirmities.
I'm no longer a boy.
I'm not a woman yet.
I'm not the person I want to be yet.
But the words to describe the gender
of the person I want to be don't exist.
So, they have to be invented.
So, you have to be poetic.
We are poets.
I was a feather blown on the gale.
I kept pitting one sex
against the other
and finding them
as pathetic as each other.
I don't understand why France,
a marvelous country I'm rediscovering...
I don't understand why it won't let
unhappy people get operated on.
People get nose jobs,
why not the rest?
My entire psychology was transformed.
Disappearance of shame,
disappearance of anxiety,
public authorization,
self-recognition,
self-esteem,
disappearance of hatred,
appearance of love...
That is the aim.
Come...
Come.
I am sick to death
of this particular self.
I want another.
I travel the world all year round.
I know 2,000 post-op women.
I don't call them transsexuals.
I say women of the year 2000.
We will soon be the women
of the year 2000.
I always say I'm a trans woman.
I say it with pride. If I were reborn,
I'd want to be the same person.
I discovered sex work, street work.
I saw women die,
girlfriends who fell right next to me,
a car went by, shots were fired,
they fell right next to me,
because of many things:
hatred, transphobia,
many horrible things.
It's what gave me the strength
to leave my home country, Venezuela.
I saw myself dead like many of my friends
who died that year.
I thought that if I stayed,
I wouldn't survive.
I can't change my identity now.
I can see myself in a mirror.
Many people see me and I'm a woman,
but unfortunately,
for institutions, hospitals, banks,
I'm a victim of transphobia
because when I hand over my I D,
they don't see the person.
The state is responsible
for sex workers' insecurity
After returning
to England as a woman
who had lost their possessions
and legal identity,
Orlando, now stateless
and accompanied only by their dog,
the only one who still recognized them,
began an endless wandering for centuries.
Come on, I'll give you...
Yes, I will.
I know, I know. Here, darling.
Hang on. Walk on 'cause it's too much.
Do it nice and easy.
Go on, off you go, darling.
You be careful.
Take it easy.
I'm Jenny Bel'Air.
I n this film I'll be
Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
I'm Rilke. In this film I'll be
the dog of Virginia Woolr's Orlando.
Hello, ma'am. How can I help?
I reserved a room
in the name of Mrs. Orlando.
- I ndeed.
- Forgive me...
I just found out that Godard died,
and it's made me so sad.
- Forgive me.
- My condolences.
I can give you Room 503.
Fine. I asked for a room
overlooking the courtyard as I hate noise.
- 503 is fine, then.
- OK. Don't forget I have a dog.
- OK?
- We accept dogs.
Excellent, good.
- Can I have your I D, please?
- Yes, I nearly forgot.
Now, then...
Here is my passport.
Thank you.
Nationality: Planet Earth
Date of hirth: 9 March 1500
Author: Virginia Woolf
Excuse me. I think this must be
your husband's. It's in a man's name.
Do I look married? Look at me.
There's no mistake. Look closely.
I did. I'm sorry,
I can't accept this I D card.
What? I'm Orlando. It's me!
Look, sir or madam, I don't know,
I can't accept this I D card.
I'm not sir or madam, I'm Orlando!
So?
Don't call me sir. Do I look like a man?
I'm not a man, you're mistaken.
It's my real passport. Look at the photo.
I saw it, but I can't accept
an I D card that isn't valid.
I have to ask you
to leave the hotel.
You do that to me?
You damn...
Shit!
Identity papers are
administrative prostheses
without which a human body in a binary
society becomes a political outlaw,
without the possibility
of owning money,
without the right to circulate
or be admitted to public institutions.
Life without administrative papers
becomes an endless waiting room.
And it is not by an oak tree
that Orlando went to seek comfort.
They went to the highest authorities
of the republic
to demand their recognition.
When I came back,
I, of course, had no right to anything.
Everything was over.
I had no papers,
everything was taken from me,
as usual.
When I think that society is everything,
society is nothing really.
It takes everything.
And what I ask is immediately,
right away, if I've come here,
respect for myself
and for everyone who looks like me.
Otherwise it's no use.
But society won't be able to kill me.
I'm Emma.
And in this film I'll be
Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
I've already lived for almost 400 years.
I've seen many things.
The colonization of America...
of Africa...
and of Asia
by Europe.
I've seen the extermination
of the first peoples,
the arrival of capitalism,
the rise of industrial production,
the destruction of nature.
They went that far.
I've seen...
the invention of normative heterosexuality
and the nuclear family.
With this belief that as a woman,
if you're not married
or you haven't given birth,
you're useless, you don't exist.
I've seen...
Oh, yes, also the invention of the notion
of transsexuality and inter sexuality
at the end of the 19th century.
With the aim of excluding us
from the human world
and making us look like monsters.
I've also seen...
the arrival of a new generation
that wanted to live like me,
without law, without God,
without gender.
But despite this growing visibility
of transgender and non-binary people,
I am in political limbo.
Without papers.
Without a real existence.
Why?
Is it so complicated
to give us new papers?
Why
does someone else, a judge,
a psychiatrist,
claim to know more than me
about my identity?
To deny our identity
is to erase us from society.
We don't exist.
It's to refuse we have rights
like others, like binary people.
But I...
I want to give myself this identity.
But I'll recognize myself.
I don't need this paper.
I'll have it one day.
But I give myself this paper, me.
I will be Emma, Orlando,
and I'll walk toward life.
Brave, happy...
I will be proud and joytul...
to be here...
with you.
I'll recognize myself
and I'll love myself.
I'm Koriangelis Brawns.
I n this film I'll be
Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
But what is an identity document
if not a piece of paper
written and printed,
a small booklet
containing a political fiction?
Shared fictions
that we have collectively constructed
and that we forget
we can question, modify, change.
Or, to put it another way, fictions
that we can lay on an operating table.
Sometimes they're really difficult.
But... we're here!
It's a big operation.
Historically, trans people have been seen
as bodies that require medical surgery
to restore continuity
between anatomy and gender.
Me too, I have been
on this operating table.
Where did you get the idea,
Virginia, of a character
who changes sex
in the middle of the novel?
Some say it was the desire
to imagine that Vita, your lover,
would not lose her inheritance rights
because she was a woman.
But the idea of a trans character,
in 1928, was not simply a literary utopia.
When you wrote Orlando, there were
already people in Europe and the U .S.
who did not identify with the gender
they had been assigned at birth
and wanted to change it.
Between 1900 and 1920, the first
sex change operations hit the news.
Then, with the discovery
of synthetic hormones,
some people began experimenting
with producing a new trans body
at the Magnus Hirschfeld I nstitute
of Sexology in Berlin.
You, Virginia, intrepid reader,
could not ignore these discourses.
Who is operated on when our bodies lie on
the operating tables of the Binary Empire?
Our bodies are discursive artifacts,
assemblages of fiction and flesh.
To operate is to intervene
not only in anatomy,
but to cut into political fiction.
I n your Orlando, you included
images of Vita and her ancestors.
But the real Orlandos of history
remained invisible.
We never operate on individual bodies.
We operate on the political history.
It is the regime of sexual difference
we have to operate on.
There are so many historical discourses
on which we must intervene.
That's me,
a non-binary 5-year-old Orlando
in the Spanish carnival,
accompanied by the fictions
of normative femininity and masculinity.
I'm Eleonore. In this film
I'll be Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
What have we done with the trans
and non-binary children that we were?
Christine Jorgensen,
the first trans woman in the media,
was a film editor before she lost her job
when she became a woman.
She said that to be trans
was to have the possibility
to edit the film of her life differently.
I'm Lilie. I n this film
I'll be Orlando.
Of Virginia Woolf.
- Virginia Woolf.
- Virginia Woolf!
I was told not to say it.
Cut!
And it is for the right to edit our lives
that we are still fighting today.
I'm Artur. In this film
I'll play Virginia WoolFs Orlando.
I'm a trans girl.
I live in Arroyo de Sansilv.
Over the last four years,
I was on a very important path,
the path to my happiness.
But it's still necessary to remember
I have the right to be called
how I feel.
Four years later,
mistakes over my name
are a bit strange,
as if anyone could doubt
I'm a trans girl.
Your Orlandos are still there.
Now, for the first time, they start
to speak up and to exist by themselves.
To choose their name
and to choose their own life.
The world to come
belongs to the new Orlandos.
They will edit the film of History.
It is for them that you wrote your book,
even without knowing it,
and that I made this film.
But of all I have to say today,
the main thing is this:
ladies and gentlemen involved in politics,
continue, despite the threats,
to make laws that recognize
that people are diverse.
Above all, we trans people
have the right to be who we are.
Don't let anyone take away our happiness.
Thank you.
Today...
Wednesday, October 11, 2028,
faced with the collapse
of the patriarchal-colonial regime,
and by the powers given to me
by Virginia Woolf and literature,
I declare
the abolition of the assignment
of sexual difference at birth
and its legal
and administrative registration.
Thus,
I grant
planetary, non-binary citizenship to
Orlando Emma.
Orlando Jenny.
- Here's to the judge!
- The judge!
I'm Virginie Despentes. I n this film
I'll be the judge
of Virginia WoolFs Orlando.