Talking About Adultery is a feature hybrid documentary film about infidelity told through confessional interviews of sex, marriage, and adultery. The film explores our 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 the director’s unexpected transformation, as she discovers her future partner through the process of making the film.
Talking About Adultery takes place in New York, the Czech Republic, a vast cactus garden in Sicily, and the homes of the film’s subjects. The film is a combination of 50 ethnographic interviews recorded over five years with lovers, husbands, wives, mistresses, and participants in non-traditional, polyamorous relationships, live collage-making drawn from the filmmaker’s original work as a fine artist; the correspondence of the protagonist B and her future partner; and the oblique but ultimately revealing perspective of an Italian philosopher of plants and gardens.
Ostensibly about infidelity, sex, and marriage, Talking About Adultery is also about how we become honest with ourselves and how we create the condition of trust with others—a subject that gets more important every day.