We Come in Peace, They Said

The work of Jyoti Mistry brings a range of elements together: film and installation, images and spoken word, poetry and politics, research and art, collective witnessing and praise in a cacophonous harmony of resistance. This inspiring trilogy on race, sex, and gender connects three films by Mistry made from 2017 to 2023.

The middle section of the trilogy, the split-screen film When I Grow Up, I Want to Be a Black Man, counters a lexicon of oppression and violence, evoked through extracts from colonial archives, with a vocabulary of freedom and dignity. It is preceded by Cause of Death, a powerful commentary on systemic violence and femicide in which voice recounts the grievous injuries inflicted on female bodies, accompanied with pulsating montages of women dancing, caregiving and working.

In the closing part Loving In Between, it is the language of freedom that prevails. It is a celebration of love, pleasure, and sexual identity; an ode to the liberating, emancipatory power of eroticism that draws inspiration from the poem by writer and civil rights activist Langston Hughes: “birthing is hard and dying is mean – so get yourself a little loving in between.”