Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth
Director: Pratibha Parmar
Writer: Pratibha Parmar
Part of: identities Festival
Seen on: 30.5.2015
[Screener Review]

Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth will be shown at the identities Festival in Vienna on June 16th, 2015, 18.00!

Plot:
This documentary is on Alice Walker, writer and activist, and all the struggles she faced in her life and her work so far. Struggles that she was always able to weather without losing her enthusiasm for protesting and calling out bullshit – or in fact the conviction that it is her duty as a human being to do so.

I admit that I knew very little about Walker going into the film. I knew that she had written The Color Purple – of which I saw the movie adaptation years ago but which I never read – and that was basically it. After seeing the documentary, I can only say – for shame. This fascinating and awesome woman should be much better known, not only to me.

Apart from Walker’s intriguing personality that we got to see in the film, two things intrigued me a litte more than the rest: one, it just became obvious – again – how short ago the history of slavery and racial segregation in the USA actually is. Sometimes I forget that and then it just hits me again really hard – and the entire country is still obviously reeling from that.

The other thing was how intertwined Walker’s writing and her activism really are: her writing is activism, and her activism and political consiousness informs her writing – of which, in case you are unaware like me, there is a whole lot more than just The Color Purple. She not only wrote about racial issues, but also about abortion, feminism and politics in general and the intersection of all of those things. And she never could do it right for everybody, getting severe criticism from white people (for obvious reasons) and black people alike (how could she write The Color Purple which addresses black male violence and not just white violence?).

Parmar does a wonderful job of telling not only her story and her private life (from first marraige to various lovers – like Tracy Chapman – to the fall-out with her daughter, which is obviously still an open wound for Walker), but highlighting the political issues that Walker tackled so far. (Those issues are of course not unrelated to her private life.) And she keeps coming back to Walker’s writing, sometimes literally superimposing facsimiles and quotes over the images we get to see.

After seeing the film, I’m pretty sure what my next book purchases will be. Because I have some serious catching-up to do.

Summarizing: If you’re interested at all in writing, activism, feminism, politics and/or racism and don’t know every detail about Walker yet, I recommend this film. If you aren’t interested in any of those things, I recommend this film even more strongly.