Nazir Ali Khan is an immigrant Indian professor at a university in Birmingham who lives with his wife and two children Saira, 17 and Asif, 14. Nazir shares a great relationship with his children and indulges their love for all things English, but has taken great pains to keep the link to home strong.
When his beloved daughter is found in an illicit relationship, Nazir is suddenly on the brink of a tough decision to make. Should he save face? Or save his daughter?
Set in today's London, in a modern Indian-Bengali doctors family. Manju's sudden death, throws Sanjay into rediscovering his relationship and the lives of his daughters. Grappling with devastating loss, missing the mediating role of his wife, Sanjay faces new crisis with the modern lives of each daughter, specially with Dia the youngest declaring her love for a Muslim boy - Imtiaz. Sanjay recollects his childhood and the trauma of Hindu Muslim riots during partition of Bengal. Finally he gets to know that his elder daughter is not his own. He reconciles as he realises nothing is perfect.
The shadow of Shakespeare's King Lear bears on this contemporary, free adaptation and works as a sub-text with Sanjay and Dia within the contours of Lear and Cordelia.
In the jungles of Borneo, an Iban father on the cusp of old age begins a river journey to seek medical help for his sick child. Along the way, the boy is troubled by recurring visions of a strange figure who appears on the river bank. As the journey progresses, father and son are drawn inexorably to a final encounter with the mythical 'transformed' shaman who dwells deep inside the jungle.
Semangat was made by working closely with one Iban longhouse community from Sarawak, Malaysia with whom the story was devised and filmed. Set in the jungles of Borneo, the basis of the film explores the conflict that exists between ancient animist beliefs and modern approaches to illness. The main protagonists of the film are a real father and son, and a retired shaman from this community.
Semangat is a micro-budget hybrid docu-fiction film funded by The Channel 4 BRITDOC Foundation, The UK Film Council/CTBF John Brabourne Award and Screen South. It has been produced under the creative guidance of award winning filmmaker, Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love). It has been co-produced with The National Film and Television School.
A fast-paced documentary populated by a charismatic and often surreal cast of characters, Shot in Bombay goes beyond the tinselly glamour of 'Bollywood' to explore the industry's darker sides. With unprecedented access to a star-studded Bombay gangster movie, the film reveals an edgy metropolis, where fiction regularly blurs into reality.
Shunyata is a short political film that may appear to explore the duplicity in our democratic system but in spirit hints at the struggle faced by minorities in just about any country. It is set in Mumbai and doesn't make any direct reference to a particular individual or event but rather every single similar event since the partition of two countries due to politically fueled religious issues which have had and will continue to have severe repercussions.
The story revolves around a Muslim girl Saeeda whose husband is picked up for questioning by the police and mysteriously disappears. It's been two years but she won't give up until she knows the truth. She forms a special father-daughter relationship with a police inspector who thinks he's helping her in her quest but doesn't realize that he will ultimately destroy her by leading her to the very people who brutally murdered her husband.
Based on an actor who suffers from an identity crisis with his film noir private detective character, whom I shall fondly refer to as - The Mole (his character actually wears a facial mole!).
Awkward and socially inept, Japanese Toshi finds himself shut out of his colleagues' fun while on a business trip in London - but Toshi's about to have some fun of his own.
Unravelling is the result of a unique film-making process.
Internationally acclaimed Nitin Sawhney composed a new score in response to an original inter-generational poetic dialogue in Urdu between Sawarn Singh, a WWII Indian soldier who fought for the British in Burma, the Middle East and Africa and his grandson, Kuldip Powar. Working with this haunting score Powar directed an evocative and searching film.
Manchester, North of England, 1976. The now much diminished, but still claustrophobic and dysfunctional, Khan family continues to struggle for survival. Sajid, the youngest Khan, the runt of the litter, is deep in pubescent crisis and under heavy assault both from his father’s tyrannical insistence on Pakistani tradition, as well as the fierce bullies in the schoolyard.
In a last, desperate attempt to ‘sort him out’, his father decides to pack him off to Mrs Khan No 1 and family in the Punjab, the wife and daughters he had abandoned 35 years earlier. It is not long before Ella Khan (Mrs Khan No 2), with a small entourage from Salford, England, swiftly follows to sort out the mess, past and present. Sequel to East is East, West is West is the coming of age story of both 15 year old Sajid and of his father, 60 year old George Khan.
Orissa, India - where tribal people fight with their bows and arrows against multinational mining moguls from London. The filmmaker, aided by two endearing, bumbling local guides, searches for answers amongst conflicting allegations, as the truth becomes more and more elusive. A humorous film about a serious subject.
Shanghai Below the High Rise is a cutting-edge documentary about Shanghai's 'underclass'; a group of millions made up of both impoverished local residents and migrant workers, who are all paying the ultimate price for the city's ongoing development programme in the lead-up to the 2010 World Expo.
In an attempt to get the stories of those worst affected, the film journeys into the city's poverty-stricken backstreets, uncovering a way of life that could very soon be gone from the city forever.
Among the many conflicts explored, we see a backstreet neighbourhood ravaged by an incomplete construction project; migrant workers forced into the city's 'hidden' economy; and former state employees left jobless, and with limited future prospects.
This is a Shanghai rarely seen in the West. This is a Shanghai from below the high rise.
Tibet. March 2008. The biggest uprising since China took control in 1959, sweeps through the country. Meanwhile, Tibetans in exile march on their homeland, determined to support their countrymen. This is a year of dramatic possibilities for Tibet. For more than 20 years, the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual and political leader, has pursued his Middle Way Approach: giving up the goal of Tibet's independence in return for genuine autonomy. But China has consistently rejected his proposal. Now, more and more Tibetans are questioning his strategy. Can the Dalai Lama's path of peace and compromise find a solution for Tibet? Or will the voices calling for independence prevail?
