What About the Queen?
My brief article on British Asian cinema published this week in Tehelka–it was originally written for a film-festival catalog edited by Sukhdev Sandhu:
The film is East is East. We are watching Damien O’Donnell’s 2000 recreation of scenes of England in the early 1970s. The Khan family — half-Pakistani, half-British, with Om Puri and Linda Bassett in the lead roles — is visiting for the day, negotiating an arranged marriage or two, catching a Hindi film: the usual.
En route, they have passed the sign for Bradford, which someone has, of course, altered to ‘Bradistan’. The family arrives at a movie theatre called Moti Mahal. With them we watch a popular song from the classic 60s hit Chaudhvin Ka Chand, but we are hardly moved. Why?
Because nostalgia by itself doesn’t cut it any more.
NICE Article
Comment by Abdullah Khan — May 13, 2007 @ 5:18 am