Year of release: 2004
Referred to as British Boyz N The Hood, compared to Juice and Ratcatcher, inspired by Ken Loach's Kes, Saul Dibb's feature film debut Bullet Boy is the story of a futile attempt to break out of a criminal milieu that ends with the protagonist's killing.
Filed under: Black British | Coming of age | Crime | Mothers | Sons
Year of release: 2002
Züli Aladag's feature film debut Elephant Heart is a coming-of-age story about a young boxer in the amateur league, who dreams of going professional but has to learn what sacrifices he has to make if he wants to reaslise his ambition. At the centre of the strory is Marco - played by Germany's rising star Daniela Brühl (Good Bye, Lenin! and The Edukators) - a young amateur boxer searching for his own identity.
Filed under: Coming of age | Crime | Fathers | Sons | Turkish German
Year of release: 2004
Ismaël Ferroukhi's first feature is a touching road movie about an elderly Moroccan father, resident in Southern France, who pressurises his irreligious 17-year-old son, Reda, to drive him on a 3,000 mile Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.
Filed under: Fathers | Journey | Maghrebi French | Religion | Sons
Year of release: 1995
The film chronicles the memories of Yüksel Yavuz's father, who migrated to Germany in 1968, where he worked in a fish factory and ship building wharf.
Filed under: Documentary | Family memories | Fathers | Sons | Turkish German
Year of release: 1997
Based on a short story and screenplay by Hanif Kureishi, the film explores the culture clash between Western secular culture and Islamic fundamentalism, situating the conflict at the heart of the diasporic family.
Filed under: Asian British | Fathers | Religion | Sons
Year of release: 2010
Bouchareb's film tells the story of Algerian resistance against French colonial rule through the microcosm of a family, consisting of three brothers, Messaoud, Abdelkader, Saïd and their fragile old mother. Tracing the colonial history and its effect upon the Algerian family between 1925, when the family is evicted from their land, and 1962, when Algeria achieved independence, the film's main focus is the period between 1955, when the family relocate to a shanty town in Nanterre and Abdelkader becomes one of the figureheads of the FLN.
Filed under: History | Maghrebi French | Sons
Year of release: 2006
Züli Aladag's controversial made-for-television film Rage imagines the encounter between a white middle-class German family and a young Turkish migrant, who intrudes into the family and terrorises them, as an escalation of violence that challenges the liberal values of the hegemonic family.
Filed under: Coming of age | Crime | Fathers | Patriarchy | Secrets | Sons | Turkish German
Year of release: 2009
This Iraqi road movie is directed by a Baghdad-born moviemaker who learned his craft in Britain. It's a gruelling, unsentimental film in a neo-realist vein, with finance from eight different countries, that follows a journey the length of Iraq made in 2003 a few weeks after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The travellers are a middle-aged Kurdish woman and her 12-year-old grandson, Ahmed, and their objective is to discover whether her son/his father, missing since the first Gulf war, is alive in a recently opened prison camp near the border with Kuwait or dead in a mass grave nearby.
Filed under: Coming of age | Sons
Year of release: 2010
This ethnic comedy examines the simple question why some ethnicities are 'more acceptable' in French contemporary society than others. The film centres on Mourad (played by the popular actor Kad Merad, himself of Algerian origin), who passes as an Italian called Dino Fabrizzi and works as a Maserati car dealer. All is well until his sick father asks him to observe the Ramadan in his stead.
Filed under: Inter-ethnic romance | Maghrebi French | Religion | Secrets | Sons | Wedding / Marriage
Year of release: 2007
Family drama about Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, a Bengali couple who emigrate from Calcutta to New York in the late 1970s, where their two children, Gogol and Sonia, are born.
Filed under: Fathers | Inter-ethnic romance | Mothers | Sons | South Asian diaspora | Wedding / Marriage