“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.

In this documentary essay, Congolese artist David Shongo addresses the problems of knowledge production and asks the important question of how it was influenced permanently and systematically by colonialist power. Analysing historical photographs, he exposes the perfidious mechanisms of colonial historiography and contrasts them with conversations with traditional scholars. They represent an exploited culture confronted not only with the theft of economic goods. It was also robbed – in a historical dimension, too – of self-perception and self-determination.

The starting point of his analysis is the examination of the photo archive of the German ethnographer and anthropologist Hans Himmelheber at the Museum Rietberg in Zürich. But Shongo’s critique of colonial historical fictions – poetic and meticulously precise at the same time – goes far beyond this. Combining specially produced and expressive images of present-day Congo with staged scenes, an offscreen commentary and documentary recordings, he manages to penetrate extremely complex contexts. A film essay that denounces the “privatisation of memory” – and contributes a long overdue, extremely important political and aesthetic position to the virulent restitution debate.