Sikh Matron
- Kinver
- 1985-10-13
Short promo for a Brit-Bollywood romance
This lively trailer promotes the Hindi-language comedy drama Pasand Apni Apni, shot entirely on location in England, with tourist-board London locations (Palace of Westminster, the banks of the Thames) front and centre. These, plus an array of the city's parks, nightclubs and even back gardens, form the backdrop to an all-singing, all-dancing Bollywood spectacle of grand passion and divided loyalties, starring Indian actress Simi Garewal.
The film's production company, London Films, cheekily borrows not just its name but its Big Ben logo from Alexander Korda's celebrated (but long-defunct) studio.
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.