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Sari Red, dir. Pratibha Parmar, 1988, UK, 11 min.
Book tickets
Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985 – 2025
This evening brings together three landmark films directed by Pratibha Parmar that chart a bold feminist politics of resistance, kinship, and solidarity across transnational feminist imaginaries.
Emergence (1986), Parmar’s first film, is a poetic meditation on identity, belonging, and collective visibility. Featuring Sutapa Biswas, Mona Hatoum, Mei Ling Jin, and Audre Lorde, the film weaves together poetry, testimony, and visual expression to explore the psychic and political textures of diasporic life.
Sari Red (1988) is a video poem and a poetical memorial to the death of one young Indian woman at the hands of racists. Sari Red eloquently examines the effect of the ever-present threat of violence upon the lives of Asian women in both private and public spheres. In this moving visual poem, the title refers to red, the colour of blood spilt and the red of the sari, symbolizing sensuality and intimacy between Asian women. Sari Red makes a break with the ‘master codes’ of cinema by using culturally specific signs and symbols to create a mise-en-scene of this loss and bereavement.
A Place of Rage (1991), one of Parmar’s most celebrated works, brings together Angela Davis, June Jordan, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Alice Walker in a powerful meditation on political and artistic solidarities forged across feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial struggles.
Together, these films highlight the radical potential of the screen as a space of memory, movement, and world-making. Blending experimental aesthetics with political testimony, Parmar traces a lineage of antiracist, transnational feminist struggle – from Britain’s migrant and diasporic communities to liberation movements across the Atlantic.
The screening will be followed by a panel discussion and the launch of a new publication on Parmar’s work, edited by season curator Nydia A. Swaby and co-produced by the ICA and Sming Sming Books. The book features contributions from Rebecca Close, Lynnée Denise, Gayatri Gopinath, Lubaina Himid, Alina Khakoo, Shamira Meghani, Lola Olufemi, Lucy Reynolds, and Nydia A. Swaby.
Click here to explore the full exhibition and event programme.
This evening brings together three landmark films directed by Pratibha Parmar that chart a bold feminist politics of resistance, kinship, and solidarity across transnational feminist imaginaries.
Emergence (1986), Parmar’s first film, is a poetic meditation on identity, belonging, and collective visibility. Featuring Sutapa Biswas, Mona Hatoum, Mei Ling Jin, and Audre Lorde, the film weaves together poetry, testimony, and visual expression to explore the psychic and political textures of diasporic life.
Sari Red (1988) is a video poem and a poetical memorial to the death of one young Indian woman at the hands of racists. Sari Red eloquently examines the effect of the ever-present threat of violence upon the lives of Asian women in both private and public spheres. In this moving visual poem, the title refers to red, the colour of blood spilt and the red of the sari, symbolizing sensuality and intimacy between Asian women. Sari Red makes a break with the ‘master codes’ of cinema by using culturally specific signs and symbols to create a mise-en-scene of this loss and bereavement.
A Place of Rage (1991), one of Parmar’s most celebrated works, brings together Angela Davis, June Jordan, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Alice Walker in a powerful meditation on political and artistic solidarities forged across feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial struggles.
Together, these films highlight the radical potential of the screen as a space of memory, movement, and world-making. Blending experimental aesthetics with political testimony, Parmar traces a lineage of antiracist, transnational feminist struggle – from Britain’s migrant and diasporic communities to liberation movements across the Atlantic.
The screening will be followed by a panel discussion and the launch of a new publication on Parmar’s work, edited by season curator Nydia A. Swaby and co-produced by the ICA and Sming Sming Books. The book features contributions from Rebecca Close, Lynnée Denise, Gayatri Gopinath, Lubaina Himid, Alina Khakoo, Shamira Meghani, Lola Olufemi, Lucy Reynolds, and Nydia A. Swaby.
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, 03 Sep 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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