Immigration Control
From the collection of
From the collection of
Foundry worker Dara Singh spends twelve back breaking hours a day at work and sends as much money home to his family in the Punjab as he can. He's not seen them for ten years because UK immigration denied them entry. The Coventry MP William Wilson outlines tales of heartache from across the Midlands. None tug the heart strings more than the man who, years before DNA testing was discovered, is unable to prove his son really is his boy.
From local news to feature film, through home movies and TV documentaries, this collection showcases South Asian Britons in front of and behind the camera. The contribution of colonial troops is illuminated through the earliest newsreels, while hardhitting current affairs programmes highlight the struggles faced in the 1960s, 1970s and beyond. Public information films produced for South Asian audiences feature alongside Hindi-language films made in Britain and interviews with prominent Asian-British figures. A bold wave of British Asian filmmaking in the 1990s is represented through early works by the likes of Gurinder Chadha and Asif Kapadia.