FREAK ORLANDO: Kleines Welttheater in fünf Episoden (Freak Orlando: Little Theater of the World in Five Episodes, 1981, in English premiered as Freak Orlando) is the second film in Ulrike Ottinger's Berlin Trilogy. Together with the other two films of the trilogy, Bildnis einer Trinkerin (Ticket of No Return, 1979) and Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press, 1984), as well as the film Madame X—Eine absolute Herrscherin (Madame X—An Absolute Ruler, 1977), Freak Orlando positioned Ottinger as a queer filmmaker whose movies, according to Michael Koresky, “are so dogged in their refusal to fit easy categories—even within cinematic subgenres that thrive on excess—that they’re unlikely to fully satisfy anyone looking for easy political directives.” While in all her early films those “at the margins come to the centre … often through a subversive take on beauty itself (and often resulting in non-heteronormative forms of attraction,” Freak Orlando focuses in five episodes on the life of the eponymous figure from antiquity to the late twentieth century, highlighting time and again the exclusionary structures in Western societies. On the one hand alluding to Virginia Woolf's Orlando, the film title on the other hand marks the non-conformity of its characters as “freakish.” If, ever since the sixteenth century, “freak” has denoted a “sudden causeless change or turn of mind; a capricious humour, notion, whim, or vagary,” it also has signified since the nineteenth century in the formulation “freak of nature” (lusus naturae) “an abnormally developed individual of any species; in recent use (esp. U.S.), a living curiosity exhibited in a show.” Freak Orlando centers on these “freaks” who signify that which was and is stigmatized and excluded in Western societies on the basis of their extraordinary bodies.

In Freak Orlando, the main protagonist Orlando is an ever-changing figure, living through centuries: Orlando is in the frame story an unnamed pilgrim who enters Freak City; in the first episode, which plays in ancient times, she is the three-eyed Orlanda Zyklopa, who works in a department store setting the pace for cobblers by hammering on her antique anvil, and who falls in love with the store announcer Helene Müller; in the second episode, which is situated in medieval times, she is the Siamese twin Orlando Orlanda whose life is defined by either being called a “Wundergeburt” or “Mißgeburt”;