Sikh Matron
- Kinver
- 1985-10-13
An appeal to Muslims to come and work in Manchester.
Calling all Muslims! This was one of four recruitment films commissioned by the British government in the early 1960s (see also Moslems in Britain - Cardiff) to encourage people from Arabic-speaking countries to come and work in Britain's industries. Aimed squarely at prospective migrants, the film presents an appealing portrait of Manchester as a warm and tolerant place offering a happy, prosperous life to the city's existing Muslim community.*To enable subtitles for this film, once playing select CC in the video playback bar (at the bottom of the screen) and select Closed Captions = On.*
Presenter Gamal Kinnay visits Manchester's cultural centres and commercial districts, interviewing, among others, an Islamic scholar, a former Mayor, a Halal butcher, and a wealthy businessmen, all of whom express deep contentment with their lot. Modern viewers can enjoy glimpses of such landmarks as Manchester Central Library and the John Rylands Library which, Kinnay boasts, holds the "the biggest written version of the Holy Quran in the world". Also depicted is the original building of the Central Mosque in Victoria Park.
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.