Year of release: 2004
Casim, a young second-generation Scottish-Pakistani man falls in love with Roisin, an Irish music teacher at his sister's school. But Casim is expected to marry a cousin from Pakistan and, despite being passionately in love with Roisin, feels initially unable to renege on the arrangement his parents made out of loyalty to his family.
Filed under: Asian British | Inter-ethnic romance | Wedding / Marriage
Year of release: 1992
A comedy about a group of Asian women from Birmingham who go on a day trip to Blackpool beach. Their little adventure provides them with an opportunity to share their secrets and to reassess their lives. It turns into a journey of self-discovery.
Filed under: Asian British | Inter-ethnic romance | Journey | Patriarchy | Religion | Secrets
Year of release: 2004
Shots of an aeroplane in the opening sequence mark the arrival of the UK-based NRI Balraj and his American friend Darcy, two single men in possession of a good fortune and in want of a wife, to Armitsar. Like Austen’s Mr and Mrs Bennet, Chadha’s Mr and Mrs Bakshi are looking for eligible suitors for their four daughters, Jaya, Lalita, Maya and Lakhi. An Indian wedding (the first of a total of four featured in the film) provides the social setting where Lalita and Darcy, Jaya and Balraj first meet. In keeping with the source novel and the generic conventions of the romantic comedy, the paths of their courtships are rocky. However, it is not the parents’ objection to the inter-ethnic romance the couple has to overcome. Admittedly, Darcy has to be educated in all things Indian – be it dancing, drumming or even keeping his Indian-style trousers from falling down – to recognise that his ethnic snobbery and arrogance vis à vis ‘Hicksville, India’, as he derogatively calls Amritsar, are out of place before he is worthy of the beautiful bride Lalita. In all other respects, Bride and Prejudice downplays the cultural difference, emphasising instead the commonalities between Indian and Western cultures. Lalita is every bit as independent and assertive as any Western woman and, except for the fact that she wears stunning saris (as well as Western clothes), has little in common with idealised notions of traditional Indian femininity promoted by Bollywood.
Filed under: Asian British | Inter-ethnic romance | Wedding / Marriage
Year of release: 1993
Café au lait is an ethnic romantic comedy that centres on Lola, a beautiful light-brown-skinned woman, of Caribbean descent and Christian, and her two lovers, Jamal, an African diplomant’s son and a Muslim, and Félix, a white, working-class Jew. She is expecting a baby but she is unsure which of her two lovers fathered the child and enlists the support of both to help her through pregnancy and motherhood.
Filed under: Inter-ethnic romance | Mothers | Secrets
Year of release: 2009
Courtesy of Luna Film and Cinemendo, © Peter Nix
Set in contemporary Berlin, the multi-strand narrative of Evet, I Do features four inter-ethnic romances between Turkish-German, Kurdish-German, Turkish, gay and heterosexual couples all of whom want to marry one another.
Filed under: Inter-ethnic romance | Turkish German | Wedding / Marriage
Year of release: 2005
Culture-clash comedy which centres on Bruce Lee fan and young Turkish hip-hopper Ibo, who lives in Hamburg and dreams of making the first-ever German kung-fu film.
Filed under: Fathers | Inter-ethnic romance | Mothers | Turkish German | Wedding / Marriage
Year of release: 2001
Alloune, a Senegalese tourist guide working in the History of Slavery Museum on the island of Goree, Senegal, decides to trace his ancestors’ routes, who were sold as slaves to the New World around 1800.
Filed under: Crime | Family memories | Inter-ethnic romance | Journey
Year of release: 2005
The film parallels two inter-racial relationships, one between the British Pakistani teenage girl Naseema, from a strict Muslim family. and the white working class boy Adam, from a working class racist family, and that of Naseema's brother Yousif and the white girl Michelle.
Filed under: Black British | Inter-ethnic romance
Year of release: 1991
The film centres on an Indian family whose migratory trajectory takes them from Uganda – from where they are expelled under General Idi Amin’s campaign to reclaim Africa for black Africans in 1972 -- via Great Britain to America, where they settle in a small town in Mississippi. Through the theme of inter-racial romance between Mina, the only daughter of Jay and Kinnu Loha, and the African American Demetrius, the film explores the race relations between the South Asian and the Black diaspora in the US.
Filed under: Inter-ethnic romance | Secrets
Year of release: 1985
Omar, a young, unemployed British-Pakistani, cares for his ailing, alcoholic, socialist father in a decaying South London ground-floor flat overlooking a crumbling rail track. His father (known as Papa to everyone in the family) urges him to go to college, but in the meantime gets him a job washing cars in his Uncle Nasser's garage. Half jokingly, Papa also asks Nasser to find him a girlfriend.
Filed under: Asian British | Inter-ethnic romance | Queer diaspora | South Asian diaspora