The trans writer and activist Paul B. Preciado used Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando, in which the title character starts life as a woman and then becomes a man, as a starting point in his documentary to look at the lives of trans people, past and present.

He cast 26 trans and non-binary people as different versions of Woolf’s famous gender nonconformist, using the book’s themes to talk about gender, social norms, and what it means to be trans.

In French with English subtitles. (98 min.) 

“A bracingly intelligent, delicate and detailed work.” –Screen International