SARI RED
In memory of Kalbinder Kaur Hayre
“Invisible winds carrying words of hatred.”
Made in memory of Kalbinder Kaur Hayre, a young Indian woman killed in 1985 in a racist attack in England, Sari Red eloquently examines the effect of the ever-present threat of violence upon the lives of Asian women in both private and public spheres. In this moving visual poem, the title refers to red, the colour of blood spilt and the red of the sari, symbolizing sensuality and intimacy between Asian women.
SARI RED is a video poem and a poetical memorial to the death of one young Indian woman at the hands of racists. The video makes a break with the ‘master codes’ of cinema by using culturally specific signs and symbols to create a mise-en-scene of this loss and bereavement.
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FILM NOTES
“The video works most sharply, however, by repetition and accumulation. The phrase ‘blood against the wall’ reoccurs on the soundtrack, and red liquid splashed on a brick wall reiterates as an image. These are not nature’s consoling repetitions. They are cold, piercing warnings. At times images overlie each other. reducing simplicity and complicating reality. And at times voices tumble, echoing, vibrating suggesting various perspectives on the awful event. The complexity of the aesthetics, including the visual superimpositions and overlapping of sounds, in addition to the poetic, repetitive quality of both the images and the voice-over, makes us aware of representation as representation. The vision of the world in Sari Red is clearly contingent on the where and when of the video’s maker. As if she were following Ruby’s directive, Pratibha Parmar gives her images of the world in such a way that we understand them to be dependent on her political and social situation, as well as her intellectual and aesthetic mission. Born in the resistance and opposition to singular views of lived experience, the video is part of a larger social movement to query the construction and proliferation of one dimensional views of cultural identity.” — Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning, Louise Spence and Vinicius Navarro.
Sari Red from Kali Films on Vimeo.