With the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival about to kick off
at the BFI Southbank, DIVA seized the chance to find out more about
independent filmmaker Pratibha Parmar's new feature documentary, in
which she explores the life and work of African American writer and
activist Alice Walker (scroll down for the trailer!)…
DIVA: We're really excited about your new documentary,
Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth. Please tell us how it came
about…
Pratibha Parmar: I first met Alice in 1991 when
I was making a film called A Place of Rage, which is about African
American women in the civil rights movement, and that film focused
on Angela Davis, who was one of the 10 most-wanted women by the FBI
at one time and an iconic Black Power symbol. It also featured June
Jordan, who is an amazing poet. It was June and Angela who
introduced me to Alice. We got on really well and a few years
later, after she wrote a novel called Possessing The Secret of Joy,
which is about female genital mutilation, she sent me the
manuscript and said, "I want to make a documentary on this subject
and will you work with me to do it?" And I said of course. We
worked on the film Warrior Marks and it was such a harrowing
experience making a film about female genital cutting that we
really bonded over having come through something so difficult. And
over the years we've remained friends.
What's Alice like? Is she a bit… starry?
Not at all! I travelled to Rwanda and Congo with her a few years
ago when she was invited by Women for Women International, an
organisation that works with women who are survivors of war and
genocide. And we were often roughing it, we weren't staying in
fancy hotels. Alice can get down and rough with the best of us, and
will not utter a single word of complaint. If anything, I was the
whinger! That's just her humility, really. No airs and graces about
her.
So, the film…
A few years ago I was watching a series of DVDs called American
Masters, about Americans who've made a big impact on American
culture, and they were all men. So I thought, actually, Alice
should be in this series. She's an American icon and has
contributed so much and shaped history and culture in fundamental
ways also in terms of literary writing as well as politics,
especially women of colour politics. So I just rang her up and
said, Alice, what do you think? And she said, sure, let's do it.
She didn't have any hesitation.
It's quite a big deal to open your life up to a
filmmaker, even if you are good friends. Was she prepared to talk
about her sexuality? About her relationship with Tracy
Chapman?
Yes, she did have a very high profile relationship with Tracy
Chapman, so there's always this incredible curiosity about Alice's
sexuality, and I do interview her about it in the film. She's very
open about the other women she's had relationships with, as well as
the relationship with Tracy. I think that's just her honesty and
respect for people she loves and has loved.
Does she ID as bisexual?
No, she won't label herself. She refuses. She says, "I'm
curious. I'm open to the spirit of a person whether that's a man or
a woman or whoever, that's not what's important to me. What's
important is the spirit". Having looked at her life and all that
she's done and having seen her in relationships with women and men,
I think she's absolutely true to herself and open to whoever rings
her bell.
So, Alice said yes to the film, and then what
happened?
I wrote to the executive producer of the American Masters
series, and said, "Where are the women's stories? I have an idea".
And she actually wrote back, which was amazing because this never
happens to me in the UK; I could write to someone at the BBC and
they could just ignore it or not get back to me. You get the third
assistant writing back eventually if you're lucky. But this time I
went straight to the top and heard back within a week saying, "I
really like your treatment [proposal] will you come in and have a
meeting?" The problem was that I was in London and they were in New
York and as an indie filmmaker I don't have funds; I literally live
hand to mouth at times. So I thought, oh no, how am I going to go
to New York? I was telling a friend and she said, "Are you mad? You
have to go! I'm going to give you my BA air miles and pay the
difference and you are going to go". So that's how I went and
within the first 10 minutes of the meeting she said, "Yes, we'd
like to do it". Which is terrific! But then they could only give a
small percentage of the full budget needed.
So where does the financial support for a filmmaker like
you come from?
With this film, all sorts of different kinds of places. None
from the UK, except when a little bit form individuals when we did
a three-month crowd-funding campaign last year. Crowd funding is
relatively new in the UK but is very much used in the US by indie
filmmakers, and artists, and musicians. Basically, you are raising
money from your potential audience and supporters. So people donate
10 dollars, 25 dollars, 100 dollars, 1000 dollars, whatever they
can afford, and you offer them little perks in return. But also
what you're offering is that they become a part of the making of
the film so you're creating a whole community around it. We've also
had funding support from ITVS and a few small grants. And we
are not fully funded so we are still raising money.
Presumably you're doing other things at the same time?
Or are you totally focused on getting money together?
Pretty much focused 100% on making this film.
You made films that were shown on Channel 4 in the early
90s that were really quite revolutionary. I can't imagine a film
being shown now about the sexuality of disabled queer people, for
example.
Exactly. That particular short, Double The Trouble Twice the
Fun, was groundbreaking in so many ways and I hadn't realised it. I
was out of the country the week it was shown and when I came back
there was a message on my answer machine from Derek Jarman, who was
like this godfather of queer cinema as far as I'm concerned. He
said: "Pratibha, it's one of the best things I've seen on TV, and
it was so beautifully done. Will you join me for tea at Madame
Bertaux's?"
Things have changed completely. There was a moment in the late
80s/early 90s when C4 seriously believed in their remit to have
programme makers who came from a diversity of backgrounds, culture,
class, race, everything. If it had not been for that support and
that excitement about bringing new kinds of stories into mainstream
television, I would not have become a filmmaker because I would not
have been able to sustain myself. Most of the films I made for them
were things that nobody at C4 would ever give me money to make any
more. They didn't fit into any conventional documentary style, or
even subject matter… That's how I got to make Khush, which was the
first documentary film about South Asian lesbians and gays, here
and in India. It was pivotal; people saw that and realised they
were not alone.
You were a writer originally. What made you turn towards
film?
I was a postgraduate, working on a PhD about Asian women workers
in the UK, which was very personal to me because we were an
immigrant family and my mother worked in a sweatshop for many, many
years as a machinist. And then I thought, who is going to read this
and what impact is it going to have on anything? And while I was
questioning this I was asked to be a researcher on a C4 documentary
series of historical portraits of black and Asian communities in
the UK. I was asked to be the researcher on the history of the
Asian community in Southall and the one in Leicester, and got
completely sucked in. The director was new, he hadn't done anything
before, everyone was learning together. And some of the interviews
that I would have included weren't in the film and I thought,
actually, I would have done that differently and I remember saying
that to someone and they said, well, why don't you direct? And I
thought, oh! Ok…
You didn't go to film school, you just got behind the
camera?
Yes. I went to some weekend workshops for women filmmakers, that
kind of thing, but no formal training. In the early years I used to
wish I had but now I'm glad because I have my own style, my own
approach, which isn't influenced by how things should be done. I
was never a good follower of rules.
Was the move into feature dramas later in your career a
way to reach audiences that might not go to watch a documentary,
but communicating similar things?
Yes, I discovered that making a documentary for C4 at that time,
I was reaching a million people and the power of that was
fantastic. When I made A Place of Rage, I remember friends saying
they were at the bus stop next morning and there was a group of
black women talking, saying wow, did you see that film? It was
amazing to provoke what we'd now term a water-cooler conversation
with a film that had no white men in it; it was all African
American women talking about their own histories on their own
terms. The seduction of mainstream media was fantastic when you
could see the impact and the reach your films could have when they
were on primetime TV. It was a buzz and it felt like a fantastic
way of intervening into mainstream culture, as an Asian woman, as a
black woman, as a lesbian.
But over the years it became more difficult to make the kinds of
docs I wanted to make with the full-on editorial control. C4 came
to rely far more on advertising revenue so for them a million
wasn't enough, they needed to get 8 million viewers. At that point
I began to think of drama as another way to tell the stories I want
to tell. Again I taught myself; I went on an intensive acting
course, where I learnt a lot about how you work with actors and
what kind of language you need to use to get the performances you
want to get. After two years of stalking the BBC drama
commissioning editor with emails, I bumped into him at BAFTA and
said, hey, you need to give me a break here. He introduced me to
the series editor of a daytime soap called Doctors and off I went
to Pebble Mill to cut my teeth. Doctors is fast track directing, it
taught me really good discipline on how to do a low-budget feature
film: do what you need to do, get what you need to get. It was good
training.
So all along I've learnt on the job, which makes you vulnerable
because if you mess up, those mistakes are there for everyone to
see, but that was the only way I could do it.
Tell us about your debut feature film, Nina's Heavenly
Delights.
I had a longing to make a feature film based on a deeply
personal experience, of me falling in love with my partner over
making curry. They say make your first film about what you know
best. I didn't want it to be a dramatic coming out story, I just
wanted it to be about food and dance, a sweet story about two young
women who fall in love. That took six years to make. I could have
made it sooner but distributors would say, "We really like the
story, we really like the script, but can you turn one of the girls
into a boy? Have you considered that, Pratibha, because it would
reach a much bigger audience?" And I would say, "No, because that's
not the film I want to make".
Sigh! But you made it…
In the end it was a huge learning curve and a tough, tough
journey but I'm so dogged; I was going to make this film by any
means necessary. Sometimes by any means necessary is not as good
for your health, and it wasn't particularly good for mine, but I
really loved that film. I spent a whole year travelling around the
world with it. It was invited to two different film festivals in
India, where I had the most amazing screenings -Indian families
coming to see it. At Chicago International Film Festival I was
sitting right at the back, observing audience reactions, and as the
credits came up, this middle-aged Indian guy got up and in the
aisle started dancing. Which is what I wanted; I wanted people to
leave the cinema wanting to dance and eat a great curry.
And another thing that happened with that film; a friend was
travelling from New York to Delhi by British Airways and the film
was being shown on the plane. He saw it was on and his cabin was
full of Indian women and kids so he went round telling everyone,
"Channel six, channel six, it's our film, it's desi film, an Indian
film by a friend of mine". And they all were watching it and then
at some point an older Indian woman said, "We didn't know about
this in our community", and he said, "Hush, just watch it, we'll
talk about it later". And by the end, he said, they all forgot
their thing about "oh my god, lesbians, we don't have them in our
culture and our community", and they were really rooting for the
girls to win the curry competition. And that was what I wanted, for
the film to be successful on my terms. I know some critics were
dismissive, but they were mostly all white men. So while it was
difficult at the time, I remembered my own personal experience of
being with the film at these screenings and hearing stories from
audiences who loved it.
So when Beauty in Truth is finished, what's
next?
Well, my partner Shaheen has slowly seduced me into tackling a
whole new genre for me, which is psychological thriller/horror.
It's not a slasher, it's more art-house in the tradition of
Guillermo del Toro who made The Orphanage, which is one of my
favourite films. One of the reasons I came around to Shaheen's
script was because artistically it offers such a great way of
telling a story. I'm really interested in mood and atmosphere and
building that up, rather than it being dialogue- or plot-led. I
just want to challenge myself creatively all the time.
Even the Alice Walker documentary - it'll be my first 90-minute
feature length doc. And there's so much there - her history,
because she came along at the same time as the civil rights
movement, and then there's her beautiful poetry - so I'm using
animation and different ways of telling and enhancing her story and
her art as a writer. I like to be always pushing the creative
boundaries for myself.
I know if I was a young white boy I'd be making this thriller,
with the script I have. I've been pigeonholed as this radical,
lesbian, political documentary maker and that's really frustrating
for me. I don't see myself as a lesbian filmmaker; I'm a filmmaker.
Yes I'm a lesbian, yes, I'm Asian, yes, I'm a feminist. All those
things impact on the sort of films I make and how I make them, but
I'm also an artist. My creativity isn't bound up and constricted by
my identities.
You are a patron of the London Lesbian and Gay Film
Festival, which has been under pressure because of cuts these last
two years. Why is it such an important event?
Over the years my films have been shown at so many international
lesbian and gay film festivals and I've been to many of them and
one of my favourites is the LLGFF, because it's home of course, but
also because of the thoughtfulness that goes into the programming.
Overall the quality has been something I really look forward to.
It's no accident that screenings sell out every single year because
it has fantastic support. And it shows that there is such hunger
from a queer audience for queer films, and that hunger doesn't go
away - it gets bigger and bigger. And when you think of the ways in
which LGBT people have started to become more part of the
mainstream - Hollyoaks has a lesbian storyline - you'd think there
wouldn't be the hunger for a queer film festival but actually it's
the opposite, because most of us who show at these festivals are
creating our stories from our own perspective, from within. On that
score alone, it's very exciting. And the atmosphere and the buzz,
and the parties. It's just great. And it's supported by the BFI and
that it's in the venue that it's in is really commendable. Not that
we should be grateful for it but it gives a certain kind of status
and respect to us and our work as queer cultural makers, that we
deserve.
The last thing I wanted to ask was whether you have any
tips or advice for new filmmakers today.
One of the things that's given me longevity as a filmmaker is
having thick skin. You cannot take no for an answer. You say, "Ok,
that was a no, but let's see if there's another door. If it's not
open can we nudge it, or push it, or even kick it?" You have to be
enterprising and think outside the box all the time. And build a
support network around yourself with other filmmakers. Have passion
and determination, and if you're not there 150% don't even begin to
go there.
If Hollywood came calling, would you
follow?
Absolutely! If the script interested me. But you know, that's
fantasy land. Who knows! I'm still open to that knock.
Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth (a work in progress)
screens at the LLGFF at 8.45pm on Thurs 29 March. For ticket
availability, go to www.bfi.org.uk/llgff/films/features/1632
For the full LLGFF 2012 programme, visit www.bfi.org.uk/llgff
For more about Pratibha Parmar's work, visit her
website at www.kalifilms.com
PHOTO CREDIT SHAHEEN HAQ
