Year of release: 2008
Courtesy of Wildbunch Distribution, © Carole Bellaïche
Paying homage to Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring, a melodrama about a father and daughter whose close and loving relationship is sacrified for the sake of social conventions, 35 Shots of Rum centres on a similarly close father-daughter bond but lacks the melodramatic affect and concludes on a more optimistic note.
Filed under: Coming of age | Daughters | Fathers
Year of release: 2004
South Wales, the present. Teenage single mother Leigh-Anne Williams lives in a council flat with her baby Rebecca. Her brother Gavin and their friends Stephen and Robbie store stolen goods there. She is not popular with her neighbours, especially the Turkish-born Hassan Osman, who lives with his daughter Julie.
Filed under: Black British | Crime | Mothers
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: 2011
On 10 September, 1964, Germany’s one-millionth ‘guest worker’ was welcomed. Spanning a period of no less than forty-five years, this film by sisters Yasemin Samdereli (director) and Nesrin Samdereli (screenplay) tells the story of guest worker number one-million-and-one – a man named Hüseyin Yilmaz and his family.
Filed under: Family memories | Fathers | Journey | Mothers | Turkish German
Year of release: 2002
Based on Meera Syal's autobiographical novel, Anita & Me centres on the bright 12-year-old Meena growing up with her Punjabi parents in a small town in the Midlands in 1972.
Filed under: Asian British | Coming of age
Year of release: 1998
The film depicts the daily life of a Kurdish German family in Hamburg. Cem, one of sons, earns his living in a slaughterhouse and has a secret love affair with a German prostitute.
Filed under: Turkish German | Wedding / Marriage
Year of release: 1998
Anita is a 'babymother', raising two children with the help of her mother Edith on a rundown estate in north-west London. Byron, her babies' father and a local reggae star, casually invites her to perform in his show, but doesn't follow up the offer. Frustrated, Anita sets up her own act with friends Sharon and Yvette. When Byron turns up to apologise, she rebuffs him. Anita's first performance at a party goes well until Byron arrives with Anita's rival Dionne, who fights with Anita.
Filed under: Black British | Daughters | Mothers | Secrets
Year of release: 2002
Jess's (Parminder Nagra) sartorial transformation
In Hounslow, west London. 18 year old Jess Bhamra dreams of playing professional football like her idol David Beckham, but her Punjabi Sikh parents have more conventional plans for her: a law degree and marriage. Jules, a white female striker, spots Jess playing park football and invites her to join the local women's team.
Filed under: Asian British | Coming of age | Fathers | Mothers | 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: 2007
Boiled down from a large literary work, though not a literary film, Sarah Gavron's Brick Lane is based on Monica Ali's prize-winning novel and resulted in an unnecessary flurry when the Bangladeshi community in the eponymous area of east London prevented it from being shot there. It's a small, touching picture about 17-year-old Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) being sent from her Bangladeshi village to marry a pompous, insensitive, self-deceiving older man in London. She bears him a son who dies, and two daughters, and much of the movie takes place in her early 30s when she's trying to break out of her housebound existence, get over her homesickness and come to terms with exile.
Filed under: Asian British | Daughters | Fathers | Mothers