Loving Highsmith

Eva Vitija's 2022 documentary tells the life of the writer Patricia Highsmith from her unpublished diaries and notebooks. Highsmith kept those texts until her death and most of them had not been public. The documentary's main subject is Highsmith's sexuality. The Price of Salt, written early in her career, was published under a pseudonym; she only claimed it under her own name in the eighties. The film shows that the concealment had to do not only with the pressure of the period but with Highsmith's own choices. Former partners and relatives in Texas speak. The documentary does not try to make her likeable; her racist and antisemitic statements come up and the film does not pass over them. Gwendoline Christie reads parts of the diaries. Who it's for: those interested in literary biography and queer history. Who it's not for: viewers wanting a literary study of her work; the film concentrates on the life.