The Loving Story

Richard and Mildred Loving married in Virginia at the end of the fifties; because one of them was white and the other Black, state law made the marriage a crime. They were arrested at home in the night, banished from the state and kept away from their own home for years. Nancy Buirski’s documentary follows the case reaching the Supreme Court in 1967 and the striking down of every interracial marriage ban in America. What sets it apart is the material it has: Grey Villet’s photographs for LIFE magazine and Hope Ryden’s 16mm footage from 1965 show the couple inside their own kitchen rather than inside court rulings. The Lovings never saw themselves as activists; they simply wanted to stay married. The documentary was broadcast on HBO in 2012 and later fed the fiction film made about them.