Freak Orlando

"It is forbidden to dream here!" says a character at the beginning of Freak Orlando, but the 126 minutes that follow show a fantastical, dizzying, reality-bending journey that only Ulrike Ottinger could craft.

Based loosely on the Virginia Woolf novel Orlando and Tod Browning's 1932 cult film Freaks, Freak Orlando sends the unique Orlando, played by Magdalena Montezuma (who you might know from the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Werner Schroeter) on a journey of constant transformation and change. Some stations of their odyssey are a nightly park filled with illuminated electric stoves, a banquet on the top of a gasometer, a psychiatric home and, finally, a contest for the ugliest people of "Freak City", all set against the backdrop of a futuristic and unfamiliar Berlin.

Wonder

In the form of a "small theater of the world", Freak Orlando is a retelling of the history of the world from the very beginning to the present day – including its errors, incompetence, beauty, thirst for power, wonder, fear, madness, cruelty and its most ordinary parts. Ulrike Ottinger's extraordinarily diverse cast of characters play out life's great dilemmas and struggles in ways that are often hilarious but occasionally heartbreaking and sometimes plain confounding.

Ottinger summons characters whose lavish, alien costumes and sets, songs, speeches and odd rituals pull us in to make the world we live in feel like a dream from a distant past.

While every film inspired by Wolf’s novel seems to go in a new direction, in each work the character of Orlando seems to bring with themselves a wild kind of freedom, almost like in a dream, to be shared by the characters, the filmmakers and by the audience. In Orlando: A Biography, Woolf writes: “He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life,” – and as the films playing in this cycle suggest, each from a different decade, the fight for the future of dreams is constant and alive.