Indian Businessman
From the collection of
From the collection of
In 1975 Parmar was the head of a business empire that combined property and film. As owner of the Villa Cross cinema in Handsworth and the Natraj complex on Leicester's Belgrave Road he typified the new successful Asian businessman in Britain. But when he arrived in the UK fourteen years earlier he only had a total of £3 in his pocket. Parmar explains the secret of his success to Tony Maycock.
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.