A Way of Life, British Cinema and New British Identities

Abstract

The last five years have seen the commercial release of a number of British films that have explored and contributed both to the generalised popular sense of contemporary British identity and, more specifically, to debates about Black, Asian and other diasporic identities in post-9/11 and post-Iraq British culture. Of course, this trend goes further back into the 1980s and 1990s with the release of such landmark films as Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Launderette (1985) or Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach (1993). Furthermore, Chadha’s early documentary I’m British But . . . (1989) is particularly relevant here in its use of the voices of young British Asians from Glasgow, Belfast, London and South Wales to articulate different experiences of identity across the UK. However, more recent offerings have often taken on the far more urgent contemporary global context and sounded warnings about the perils of polarised visions of contemporary British identity. This more recent group of films includes Dirty Pretty Things (2002) which once again sees Stephen Frears making powerful narrative drama from everyday stories of racist oppression in contemporary Britain, In This World (2002), Michael Winterbottom’s remarkable tale of the journey of two Afghan asylum-seekers, and Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort (2000), a bleak tale of Russian asylum-seekers in a Margate that looks far more grim and devastated than any Cold War vision of a Moscow suburb. More recently still, the dominance of a racism focused more specifically on anti-Islamic sentiments has been at the forefront of films such as Kenny Glenaan’s Yasmin (2005) and Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo (2006), as well as extended work for television such as Peter Kosminsky’s Britz (2007). While all of these examples, with the exception of Chadha’s I’m British But . . . , use an English setting or context for the narrative,