Summer cinema

Orlando, My Political Biography (English, 98 min., 2023, dir. Paul B. Preciado)
Language accessibility: English with Czech subtitles
Free entry

An essayistic documentary inspired by Virginia Woolf’s famous work. The film is a manifesto on the freedom of identity, which, through the testimonies and stories of trans and nonbinary individuals, illustrates the struggle for the right to be oneself despite social norms.

From acclaimed writer and activist Paul B. Preciado, Orlando: My Political Biography is a bold and joyous celebration of trans identity, told through the lens of Virginia Woolf’s iconic novel. Woolf’s Orlando follows the centuries-spanning life of a young nobleman who awakens to find that they are a woman. Almost a century after its publication, Preciado claims that fiction has become reality and that Orlando’s story lies at the root of all contemporary trans and nonbinary life.

Told through a myriad of trans and nonbinary voices living today—our new “Orlandos”—this documentary offers a dazzling example of how life, poetry, and gender can meet in the search for truth.

Paul B. Preciado is a philosopher, curator, transgender activist, and one of the leading thinkers in the study of gender and sexual politics. He is the author of Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (The Feminist Press, 2013), Countersexual Manifesto (Columbia University Press, 2018), Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics (Zone Books, 2014), for which he was awarded the Sade Prize in France, Dysphoria Mundi: A Diary of Planetary Transition (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025), and the essay Can the Monster Speak?, which is due to be published in Czech by tranzit.cz in December 2026. 

From 2011 to 2014 he was the head of research at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art and the director of its Independent Studies Program. From 2014 to 2017 he was the Curator of Public Programs for documenta 14 (Kassel/Athens). In 2019 he was a resident at LUMA Arles and curator of the Taiwan Pavilion for the 2019 Venice Biennale, where he presented the artist Shu Lea Cheang.