Toronto-based critic, editor, and film curator Saffron Maeve shares a collection of five shorts by British filmmaker Pratibha Parmar, released from 1988-1991.
“Pratibha’s works have a strong decolonial sensibility that I immediately respond to, and I admire her ability to be at once playful, coy, headstrong, and critical in her depictions of queer South Asian diasporas. She understands the shared urgency of desire and the constraints that are placed upon it.” – Saffron Maeve on Shades of Feeling: Five by Pratibha Parmar
From the 80s into the 90s, British filmmaker Pratibha Parmar established a body of short films and video poems dealing intimately with ethnic and sexual expressivity in a blinkered UK. Carving out a queer South Asian imaginary, Parmar’s films prioritize pleasure (khush) and thematize lesbian chat rooms, the infiltration of colonial architecture, desire and diaspora, and the writings of Indian lesbian poet Suniti Bamjoshi. Parmar’s spatially engaged strategies of revolt are both protective and generous, clarifying the importance of anti-colonial perspectives on queerness. This program originated at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in partnership with Alfreda’s Cinema.
Shades of Feeling: Five by Pratibha Parmar will be presented with a live introduction from Saffron Maeve and a special pre-recorded Q&A with director Pratibha Parmar.
Saffron Maeve is a Toronto-based critic, editor, and film curator. She is a regular contributor to The Globe and Mail, and her writing has appeared in Film Comment, Sight and Sound, Reverse Shot, MUBI Notebook, Documentary Magazine, and more. She is the curator of the screening series CONTOURS at Paradise Theatre and Apparatus Theory at Revue Cinema, and the quarterly reading series Crit Salon. Saffron has curated programs for TIFF, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Cinematheque (BC), and Spectacle Theater. Presently, Saffron is pursuing a PhD in Cinema & Media Studies at York University.
