Freak Orlando

Director: Ulrike Ottinger

1981 / 126min / DCP

An outrageous, carnivalesque camp reading of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Ottinger’s crazed comedy follows its gender nonconforming hero/heroine through five wide-ranging adventures that span the history of the world: the Freak City department store, medieval times, the Spanish Inquisition, the circus sideshow, and then off on a European tour. With avant-garde star Magdalena Montezuma brilliant in the shapeshifting central role, close collaborator Delphine Seyrig as Orlando’s female opposite number (with filmmaker Jackie Raynal as her Siamese twin), and cinema’s greatest transgender Jesus.