Bara Jichova Tyson's feature film, Talking About Adultery, is a hybrid documentary about love and desire, commitment and infidelity. The film premiered as an official selection at the 2019 Sheffield Doc/Fest and was nominated for the 2019 Sheffield Doc/Fest New Talent Award.
Talking About Adultery explores the hunger to find fulfillment through acts of committing to—and straying from—our partners, and how the secrets we keep—and the lies we tell—in our search for love and desire reveal who we are. It is also the story of Jichova Tyson's own unexpected transformation, as she discovers her future partner through the process of making the film.
The film is based on 50 ethnographic interviews, purposely anonymous, that Jichova Tyson recorded during a period of five years with lovers, husbands, wives, mistresses, and also participants in non-traditional and polyamorous relationships, in New York, the Czech Republic, a vast cactus garden in Sicily, and the homes of the film's subjects.
Jichova Tyson creates a visual language which includes: live collage-making drawn from her original work as a fine artist; love letters with her husband-to-be; archival and abstract film footage; and the oblique but ultimately revealing perspective of an Italian philosopher of plants and gardens.
Talking About Adultery was an opportunity to inquire-stir-provoke an intimate conversation on the theme of trust and honesty, and create space for the audience to continue those conversations. As an artist who grew up in the former socialist republic of Czechoslovakia and now lives in the United States, Jichova Tyson has long been interested in the possibility/impossibility of trust between people, and also the imaginary stories people tell themselves to justify how they live, who they are, and who they want to be. She understands relationships as being a constant reassembly of different parts: elements of personality, history, beliefs, values, culture, memory, experience, geography—all of which change.
###
