Year of release: 1999
Directed by:
Damien O'Donnell
Salford, 1971. Proud Pakistani chip shop owner George Khan lives in a terraced house with his white wife Ella and their seven children. Determined to raise them as traditional Muslims, George sends sons Nazir, Abdul, Tariq, Saleem, Maneer and Sajid to the mosque and makes daughter Meenah dress in saris. However the kids will not submit quietly.
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Filed under: Asian British | Coming of age | Fathers | Mothers | Patriarchy | Queer diaspora | Religion
Year of release: 1998
Directed by:
Kutlug Ataman
Lola (Gandi Mukli) performing as one of The Women Guest Workers (courtesy of zero fiction film)
Set in Berlin's Turkish German gay and transvestite subculture, the film tells the story of Lola, a drag queen in a cabaret act called 'Die Gastarbeiterinnen' (the female guest workers), her macho lover Bilidikid and her brother Murat. The disclosure of her sexual identity resulted in her being evicted from her traditional Turkish family seventeen years ago.
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Filed under: Patriarchy | Queer diaspora | Secrets | Turkish German
Year of release: 1985
Directed by:
Stephen Frears
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.
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Filed under: Asian British | Inter-ethnic romance | Queer diaspora | South Asian diaspora
Year of release: 2006
Directed by:
Pratibha Parmar
Courtesy of Verve Pictures
Described by Pratbha Parmar as a film about the family, food and love, this ethnic romantic comedy tells the story of Nina Shah, a young Scottish Asian woman, who falls in love with the white Scottish Lisa while preparing to enter into a televised cooking competition.
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Filed under: Asian British | Daughters | Ethnic food | Inter-ethnic romance | Queer diaspora | Secrets
Year of release: 2000
Directed by:
Olivier Ducastel,
Jacques Martineau
When Felix, a gay, HIV-positive man of mixed French Maghrebi descent, loses his job in Dieppe he takes the opportunity to embark upon a journey in search of his father, whom he never met.
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Filed under: Fathers | Journey | Maghrebi French | Queer diaspora
Year of release: 2007
Directed by:
Fatih Akin
Courtesy of Corazón International
The film traces the journeys of sons and daughters, mothers and fathers between Turkey and Germany, searching for each other. In the process, families fall apart through conflicts and sudden deaths and, in the end, new familial bonds are forged.
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Filed under: Fathers | Journey | Mothers | Queer diaspora | Turkish German
Year of release: 1993
Directed by:
Ang Lee
Wai-Tung, a Taiwanese American, lives with his American partner Simon in a long-term gay relationship in Manhattan. Wai-Tung's Taiwan-based parents are unaware of their son’s sexual orientation and want him to get married to a Chinese woman and produce an heir so as to continue the family line.
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Filed under: Inter-ethnic romance | Patriarchy | Queer diaspora | Secrets | Wedding / Marriage
Year of release: 2004
Directed by:
Ian Iqbal Rashid
Alim, of Muslim Pakistani origin, currently lives with his gay lover Giles in London. When his domineering mother Nuru comes over from Toronto to stay with her son for a while, Alim pretends that he is just flat-sharing with Giles.
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Filed under: Inter-ethnic romance | Mothers | Queer diaspora | Secrets | South Asian diaspora | Wedding / Marriage
Year of release: 2000
Directed by:
Ayse Polat
Ayse Polat’s road movie cum coming-of-age film Tour Abroad, which has been compared to Central Station (Walter Salles, Brazil, 1998) and Kolya (Jan Sverak, Czech Republic, 1997) and Alice in the Cities (Wim Wenders, 1974), sketches the development of a father-daughter relationship between an orphaned eleven-year-old girl and a would-be Turkish drag queen.
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Filed under: Coming of age | Daughters | Fathers | Journey | Mothers | Queer diaspora | Turkish German
