“I am the woman, dark, repaired, healed, listening to you.
I would give to the human race only hope…”
One of the things that I’ve really focussed on
and looking back at the trajectory of my work,
and the body of my work is being a commitment to
social justice, to equality, to visibility
of people who don’t normally get their stories told on mainstream media.
So I think that would be one of the things that I feel
I have achieved as a filmmaker in bringing
these marginal stories into the mainstream.
One of my films that I made with the Pulitzer prize winning novelist Alice Walker
was called Warrior Marks, and the film was about
the very difficult and taboo subject at the time of female genital mutilation.
The film actually, you know, for me was a kind of modest little film,
but the incredible global impact it ended up having
was such an eye opener in terms of the power of media
to create change, so the whole language in which we were talking about,
within the film, about female genital mutilation being a human rights issue
was something that hadn’t been talked about in those terms.
I think that for me that was an incredible achievement
to really change the language and the discourse around this really
horrific issue and make it a human rights issue.
I was the first person in my family to ever go to University.
I come from an immigrant family, a working class immigrant family,
and so the experience of actually going to university in itself was a huge big leap,
and culturally kind of shocking.
I never left home before, but I found in Bradford,
and particularly on the course that I did
both in terms of the professors and the tutors and the other students
a kind of a home where I feel I actually flourished
and I began to come out of my very shy,
you know nobody believes me now when I say I’m actually very shy
"But like really? Yea, sure." I was actually very shy when I first went,
and was very kinda shy about speaking in seminars or talking up.
But I think the course, what the course did,
and what being at Bradford University helped me do
was find my own voice.
I spent 3 months working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta
and I would say that that was the experience that kinda flipped my life around,
flipped my mind around, emotionally completely churned me up.
It was, you know, I was this naive 20 year old
and I came face to face with some of the most intense poverty in the world.
One day I was watching all these films
on a series called American Masters that goes out on PBS,
and all of these stories were about American men
who have made an impact on American culture,
and the ways in which they have shaped American culture;
but there were very little, if any stories about women
intellectual, women shapers of culture, women who’ve created histories,
and so the obvious thing for me to question was
“Why hasn’t anyone made a film about Alice Walker?”
Alice Walker is a daughter of share croppers
who grew up on a shack on a plantation in the south in Georgia.
And from that humble beginnings to then go on to write over 30 books,
make history as the first African American woman
to win the Pulitzer prize for her novel The Colour Purple was an incredible story,
and I wanted to tell that story,
and so Alice Walker Beauty and Truth is the film about her life.
"Blooming gloriously for itself."