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Khush, dir. Pratibha Parmar, UK, 1991, 26 min.
Book tickets
Connecting Thin Black Lines: 1985 – 2025
This evening brings together three films by Pratibha Parmar that explore South Asian queer diasporic life through modes of intimacy, memory, and resistance.
Memory Pictures reflects on love, migration, and longing through the photographic archive of Sunil Gupta, blending image and narration to explore queer self-making.
Flesh & Paper traces the poetic and intellectual intimacy between writer Suniti Namjoshi and Gillian Hanscomb, offering a rare glimpse into the quiet, sensual contours of lesbian kinship and creative collaboration
Finally, Khush is a landmark documentary that celebrates the joy, resilience, and collective strength of queer South Asians in the UK and India—foregrounding voices too often excluded from mainstream cultural narratives.
Together, these films form a sensuous and expansive archive of queer South Asian life, centring pleasure, kinship, and self-determination as radical forms of political expression. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Pratibha Parmar and writer and educator Abeera Khan.
Click here to explore the full exhibition and event programme.
This evening brings together three films by Pratibha Parmar that explore South Asian queer diasporic life through modes of intimacy, memory, and resistance.
Memory Pictures reflects on love, migration, and longing through the photographic archive of Sunil Gupta, blending image and narration to explore queer self-making.
Flesh & Paper traces the poetic and intellectual intimacy between writer Suniti Namjoshi and Gillian Hanscomb, offering a rare glimpse into the quiet, sensual contours of lesbian kinship and creative collaboration
Finally, Khush is a landmark documentary that celebrates the joy, resilience, and collective strength of queer South Asians in the UK and India—foregrounding voices too often excluded from mainstream cultural narratives.
Together, these films form a sensuous and expansive archive of queer South Asian life, centring pleasure, kinship, and self-determination as radical forms of political expression. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Pratibha Parmar and writer and educator Abeera Khan.
Click here to explore the full exhibition and event programme.
Bio
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.
Book tickets
07:00 pm
Wed, 02 Jul 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.