Arts Centre
From the collection of
From the collection of
At Cannon Hill Park in Birmingham the Midlands Arts Centre reverberates to the sounds of Asian music and dance. A group of young people are taking their first tentative steps in learning Bharathanatiyam dance whilst the renowned Tara Arts group has taken over the main stage to rehearse a play about the Raj. The Asian Arts Action Group is behind the event that showcases Asian culture in the Midlands.
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.