ICA is closed from the 30 May – 3 June inclusive.
Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth, dir. Pratibha Parmar, 2013, 84 min.
Book tickets
Connecting Thin Black Lines, 1985 – 2025
This richly layered portrait of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker traces her journey from the segregated American South to international literary and activist acclaim.
Directed by her longtime friend and feminist comrade Pratibha Parmar, Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth offers an intimate and expansive account of Walker’s life, writing, and political vision. Through rare archival footage, interviews, and poetic storytelling, the film explores the personal and political struggles that shaped Walker’s path – from her early life in Georgia to her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, her literary breakthrough with The Color Purple, and her continued advocacy for racial, gender, and ecological justice.
Far more than a biographical documentary, Beauty in Truth is a powerful meditation on the intersections of art and activism. Parmar situates Walker’s legacy within broader antiracist, Black feminist, queer, and anti-imperialist movements, making visible the complex networks of solidarity and resistance that define her life and work.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Pratibha Parmar and season curator Nydia A. Swaby, offering an opportunity to reflect on the film’s resonances, its collaborative process, and the enduring political power of Walker’s voice.
Click here to explore the full exhibition and event programme.
This richly layered portrait of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker traces her journey from the segregated American South to international literary and activist acclaim.
Directed by her longtime friend and feminist comrade Pratibha Parmar, Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth offers an intimate and expansive account of Walker’s life, writing, and political vision. Through rare archival footage, interviews, and poetic storytelling, the film explores the personal and political struggles that shaped Walker’s path – from her early life in Georgia to her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, her literary breakthrough with The Color Purple, and her continued advocacy for racial, gender, and ecological justice.
Far more than a biographical documentary, Beauty in Truth is a powerful meditation on the intersections of art and activism. Parmar situates Walker’s legacy within broader antiracist, Black feminist, queer, and anti-imperialist movements, making visible the complex networks of solidarity and resistance that define her life and work.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Pratibha Parmar and season curator Nydia A. Swaby, offering an opportunity to reflect on the film’s resonances, its collaborative process, and the enduring political power of Walker’s voice.
Click here to explore the full exhibition and event programme.
Bios
Pratibha Parmar (b. 1955) is an award-winning filmmaker and activist whose groundbreaking work centres marginalised stories with bold creativity and political urgency. Her oeuvre spans experimental shorts, activist documentaries, and feature-length works, forging a cinematic language rooted in what she calls visual justice: a queer diasporic strategy for generating networks of solidarity, art, and pleasure. Her internationally acclaimed films Khush (1991) and Warrior Marks (1993) have contributed to advancing rights for women, girls, and LGBTQ+ communities around the world. An earlier video, Sari Red (1988), is held in the permanent collections of MoMA (New York) and the Centre Pompidou (Paris). Most recently, Sari Red and Reframing AIDS were featured in Women in Revolt! at Tate Britain (2023–24).
Parmar has received numerous honours, including the ICON Award for Outstanding Contribution to Indian and World Cinema, the Frameline Award for LGBTQ+ media, and the 2022 Mind the Gap award, previously awarded to Viola Davis and Emerald Fennell. She has taught film as Associate Professor at California College of the Arts, served as a Visiting Artist at Stanford University, and is a member of both the Directors Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She is also the author, co-author, and editor of several books and essays, and is currently writing her memoir.
Nydia A. Swaby is a black feminist artist-researcher, writer, and curator. Her practice engages archives, autoethnography, photography, the moving image, and the imagination to explore the gendered, diasporic, and affective dimensions of black being and becoming. Nydia is a member of the editorial board of Feminist Review and co-edited its special issue on Archives. She holds a PhD from the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS, University of London, and has previously worked at the ICA and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Nydia was the inaugural Caird Research Fellow jointly based at Royal Museums Greenwich and UCL’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. She is currently a Whose Heritage Curatorial Fellow at Royal Museums Greenwich and serves on the advisory board for the Atlantic Worlds Gallery at the National Maritime Museum. Her first book, Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives, was published by Lawrence Wishart in October 2024 as part of its Radical Black Women series. She is the curator of Our Eyes as Commonly Tender: Visual Justice in the Filmmaking of Pratibha Parmar and To Learn to Dance with Fireflies, First Accept the Dark: Five Films by Helen Cammock, both presented as part of Connecting Thin Black Lines, 1985–2025.
Book tickets
07:00 pm
Wed, 06 Aug 2025
Cinema 1
£15 full price / £13 concession
Ticket information
- All tickets that do not require ID (full price, disabled, income support) can be printed at home or stored in email
- For aged-based concession tickets (under 25, student) please bring relevant ID to collect at the front desk before the event.
Access information
Cinema 1
- Both our Cinemas have step free access from The Mall and are accessible by ramp
- We have 1 wheelchair allocated space with a seat for a companion
- All seats are hard back, have a crushed velvet feel and they do not recline
- These are our seat size dimensions: W 42 x D 45 x H 52
- Arm rest either side of the seat dimensions: L 27 x W 7 x H 20
for the following requirements:
- We have unassigned seating. If you require a specific seat, please reserve this in advance
- Free for visitors where ticket prices are a barrier, please email
Screening as part of Our Eyes as Commonly Tender: Visual Justice in the Filmmaking of Pratibha Parmar
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no. 236848.