Film Archive

Jahr

Filmstill Loving in Between

Loving in Between

Loving in Between
Jyoti Mistry
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
Austria,
South Africa
2023
18 minutes
English
Subtitles: 
None

“Folks, I’m telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean – so get yourself a little loving in between.” This advice of the African-American civil rights activist and jazz poet Langston Hughes precedes Jyoti Mistry’s found footage storm of images and runs like a guiding line through the archive material, a panopticon of revelries: parties, boxing matches, visits to the beach and above all, time and again, testimonies of lived queer sexuality. Sometimes clandestine, sometimes quite public.

Mistry mirrors the uninhibitedness of her sources in the way she arranges them – not neatly staggered but boldly mixed. The associative editing often virtually leaps into the images, linking them with purple colour explosions and three-dimensional animations of shoals of fish. On the soundtrack, a spoken word performance joins multi-channel dubbed noises and countless variations of the jazz standard “Diga Diga Doo.” This is how the film wrests its testimonies from the past and returns them to their inherent liveliness and transgressive explosive power.

Felix Mende

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Jyoti Mistry
Script
Jyoti Mistry, Napo Masheane, Kgafela oa Magogodi
Editor
Nikki Comninos
Producer
Florian Schattauer
Sound Design
Peter Cornell
Score
Nishlyn Ramanna
Animation
The Kinetic
World Sales
Gerald Weber