10 great films about South Asian Britain

One of the UK’s most popular films of the early noughties was Gurinda Chadha’s Bend It like Beckham (2002), a huge box office success. It’s considered to be the highest grossing film about the sport of football.

Football is not the sole focus of the film’s story. The protagonist, Jess, has Punjabi heritage and has to balance the cultural and religious expectations of her Sikh father with her football career. The box office smash showed that films featuring a British Indian character had mainstream appeal, and the film would later be adapted into a West End musical. However, the link between British cinema and the South Asian experience doesn’t start and stop with Bend It like Beckham.

In the 1950s immigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh began making their homes here in the UK, many of them forced out of their homeland due to the chaos caused by partition. These early members of the South Asian community in the UK often faced racism and financial hardship. One result is that the South Asian experience has a distinctive voice, one that has made itself heard in British cinema since the 1970s.

From the clash between honouring the rigid traditions of Pakistani life in Manchester featured in East is East (1999), to the gentle romance of Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook in Ali & Ava (2021), here are 10 films that explore this uniquely British South Asian voice in cinema.

Director: Peter K. Smith

A Private Enterprise is thought to be one of the first films that focused on the South Asian experience in Britain. The protagonist Shiv (played by Salmaan Peerzada) is an entrepreneurial Indian immigrant juggling the cultural expectations of his community with his business ambitions. Shot on a tiny budget, the film gives the viewer a social realist insight into what it was like for an Indian immigrant trying to get by in 1970s Britain. Shiv is driven by a desire to set up a workshop making plastic Indian trinkets, which brings him into conflict with his friends, family and the local community. The film’s script was co-written by Dilip Hiro, who himself immigrated to the UK from India and would go on to become an author, journalist and political commentator.

Director: Stephen Frears

Set in Wandsworth during the 1980s and directed by Stephen Frears, My Beautiful Laundrette follows Omar (Gordon Warnecke), a British-born Pakistani who instead of going to university takes up the job of running a small, run-down laundrette that his roguish, desi-Del Boy uncle owns. His father, an idealist left winger who has given up on life and hit the vodka, desperately wants him to go into further education rather than pursuing a career in washing machines and soap. However, he doesn’t know that Omar is having a love affair with his colleague Johnny (a young Daniel Day-Lewis), an old friend he lost touch with because he had joined the National Front. Frears’ film is not only a romantic drama but also a comment on Thatcherism, lack of opportunity and racism.

Director: Alan Clarke

Remaining in Thatcher’s Britain, Rita, Sue and Bob Too follows the lives of two working-class school girls who are both in a three-way affair with a creepy, middle class, married man called Bob. The film was adapted from a play by writer Andrea Dunbar, who based the narrative on a lot of her own experiences growing up on tough council estates in Bradford.

Sue decides to leave the threesome she’s in with Rita and Bob and begins dating Aslam, a young British Pakistani cabbie also living on her estate, played by a young Kulvinder Ghir (who would go on to find fame in the incredibly successful British Asian sketch show Goodness Gracious Me). Aslam shows Sue a different side to her local area, taking her on a date to a Bollywood cinema and introducing her to his Urdu speaking mother. The racist attitudes of the time are explored when Aslam, during a visit to Sue’s family home, is racially abused by her unpleasant, alcoholic father.

Director: Gurinder Chadha

Penned by Meera Syal, this early feature from Gurinda Chadha follows a group of intergenerational Punjabi women on a day out to see the Blackpool illuminations, and the film focuses on the clash between modernism and the traditional values of Punjab. Hashida is in a relationship with Oliver, a British man with Afro-Caribbean heritage, and has recently discovered she is pregnant with his child. She’s faced with the dilemma of keeping the child and telling her conservative Indian parents or calling off the relationship to conform to the Punjabi customs enforced on her by the older generation. Chadha would go on to write and direct Bend It like Beckham and is one of the most successful filmmakers with South Asian heritage in the UK.

Director: Damien O’Donnell

Based on a play by Ayub Khan-Din, East Is East is one of the few British films that explores the complexities of navigating dual heritage. Om Puri plays George Khan, a Pakistani chip shop owner who has married Ella, a local Mancunian woman played with dry humour by Linda Bassett. George enforces Pakistani traditions on his six children, threatening them with violence if they refuse to conform to the customs of his homeland. He refers to his oldest son as being dead when in reality he ran away from an arranged marriage that he didn’t want to happen. This forces George to be even harder on his three younger sons. The film somehow manages to straddle comedy and tragedy in equal measure, combining laugh out loud comedic moments (keep your eye for a randy dog!) with heartbreakingly tragic scenes.

Director: Steve Loveridge

Stitched together from the singer’s personal archive of music and video footage, Steve Loveridge’s documentary explores the life and career of the award winning musician M.I.A. Her Sri Lankan heritage features heavily in the film’s narrative. From 1983 to 2009 Sri Lanka was going through a bloody civil war between the Sinhalese and the Tamil populations on the island, and M.I.A.’s father was a Tamil activist and revolutionary. To escape the violence of the war her family fled Sri Lanka for London, leaving her father in the country. The documentary explores how M.I.A.’s cultural heritage has informed her art, music and cultural outlook on the world.

Director: Julian Jarrold

Based on the bestselling novel by Zadie Smith and featuring an early on-screen outing from James McAvoy, the TV show White Teeth explores the experiences of two families – the Jones and the Iqbals – living in the multicultural area of Kilburn. Om Puri plays Samad Iqbal, a Bangladeshi immigrant who is trying to enforce the values of his homeland on his two twin sons Magid and Millat. Much like his character George in East Is East, Puri plays the role as an overbearing patriarch; his son Magid is sent to Bangladesh to avoid becoming westernised. On the other hand, Millat (Christopher Simpson from Brick Lane) remains in London and is at constant odds with his father for being a teenage rebel. The identity crisis of being a typical London teenager and a good Bangladeshi son eventually motivates Millat to join an extremist Islamic sect.

Director: Sarah Gavron

Geographically, Brick Lane has had a strong link to the Bangladeshi community since the 1950s, so much so that the street signs are in English and Bengali. Adapted from Monica Ali’s novel, this film follows the experiences of Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee), a young Bangladeshi woman living in London, as she tries to escape the pressures of an arranged marriage. Her marriage to her husband Chanu is loveless and she begins to fall for a younger man, Karim (Christopher Simpson), who she meets in the local area. Racism and islamophobia form a backdrop in this film as racial tensions and resentment towards the Muslim community begin to rise after the 9/11 attacks.

Director: Bassam Tariq

In Mogul Mowgli Riz Ahmed plays Zed, a British Pakistani rapper on the cusp of breaking America and achieving international success. He returns to his hometown of Wembley (an area of London with a huge South Asian community) after a two year absence and is struck down with an autoimmune disease that stops him returning to America, robbing him of the chance to fulfil his musical dreams. His Pakistani family is still feeling the pain of partition, and his father recounts how they only just managed to escape on a train out of India. As the illness takes hold of Zed more and more, the film switches from a social realist feel into something more akin to a Lynchian fever dream. First-time feature director Bassim Tariq co-wrote this film with Riz Ahmed, who wove in real life experiences he has as a musician in the film’s story, creating a musical meditation on cultural identity, partition and coming of age.

Director: Clio Barnard

Clio Barnard’s 2021 film Ali & Ava oozes with romantic warmth. We follow Ali (played with boyish innocence by Adeel Akhtar), a British Pakistani landlord with a kind heart who loves spending time with his record collection and can magically charm local scallywags by blasting hip-hop out of his car. He meets Ava, a classroom assistant played by Claire Rushbrook, while taking one of the daughters of his tenants to school, and a romance soon blossoms between the pair. However, Ali has a secret: he’s separated from but still lives with his wife. In some cases divorce is frowned upon in the Pakistani community and Ali can’t bring himself to tell his parents for fear that they will reject him.