Freak Orlando

Ulrike Ottinger's Berlin trilogy is a journey through different cultures and worlds, across dusty moonscapes and through the Berlin underground.

FREAK ORLANDO: Ulrike Ottinger's "small theater of the world" traces an arc from mythological prehistory to the 20th century in five episodes that tell of the lives and deaths of freaks, abnormal beings, and outsiders, of mistakes, incompetence, hunger for power, fear, madness, cruelty, and everyday life. Led by Orlando (Magdalena Montezuma), who wanders through the centuries, and Delphine Seyrig in a wide variety of roles (from the Tree of Life goddess to Siamese twin), the episodic journey through time and the world begins with a sale of myths in a department store and ends at a "festival of ugliness". A fantastic collage of grotesque, satire, uncanny and surreal.