Paul B. Preciado | 2023 | France | 98’ | EN subs

It was a blessing to have the first Porn Film Festival Amsterdam in February with much support from audiences and communities. The festival sprouted out of Cavia’s monthly sex-positive programme Kissable Screens and hosted a programme that cared for all bodies and listened and waited for opportunities to build community and solidarity.

This month, Kissable Screens programmes a film of queer theorist and activist Paul B. Preciado: Orlando, My Political Biography.

The film features many Orlando(s) who speak of their own archetype beyond the identity of gender dichotomy. They embody not a single transformation of Orlando, like it has been portrayed in the novel of Virginia Woolf or many other depictions, but these are the many Orlando(s) that have been excluded from transgender history and have stood up against the violence of the heterosexual constraint. Paul wants to tell that the trajectory of Orlando is not a personal matter, but is linked to a system of norms and oppression by emphasizing the "collective". In Paul’s words: "it’s a matter of inventing other common, shared, collective, and copyleft forms of sexuality that extend beyond the narrow framework of the dominant pornographic representation and standardized sexual consumption" (Testo Junkie, 2008).