Focus Features

To coincide with the release of Focus Features’ forthcoming Sin Nombre, David Parkinson takes an exhaustive look at the depiction of immigrants in modern world cinema. In the final part, he looks at the impact of immigrants settling in.

One Dollar Curry

Migrants have been settling in their adopted homes for centuries and many screen nomads have put down roots of their own.

The Moroccan and Indian families arriving in an isolated village on the edge of Israel's Negev Desert in the late 1960s find ways to rub along together in Avi Nesher's Turn Left At the End of the World (2004), while North Korean wanderer Seo Jung and her stroppy son Shin Dong-ho seem content to share Mongolian Bat-Ulzii's lonely vigil planting trees to stem the slow creep of the steppe sands in Lu Zhang's Desert Dream (2007). And Ukrainian illegal Ingeborga Dapkunaite appears equally ready to make a home in Brussels with van driver Jacques Gamblin in Stéphane Vuillet's 25 Degrees in Winter (2004), following the lead of his Spanish mother, Carmen Maura.

Having relocated from Beirut at the age of 10, Josef Fares is uniquely qualified to discuss being Lebanese in Sweden, which he does amusingly in Jalla! Jalla! (2000) - in which park-keeper Fares Fares has to summon the courage to tell father Jan Fares that he can't enter into an arranged marriage with teenager Laleh Pourkarim because he's dating local lass, Tuva Novotny - and to more dramatic effect in Zozo (2005), as 10 year-old Imad Creidi escapes the civil war that claimed his parents and settles in the southern town of Karlstorp with grandparents Elias Gergi and Yasmine Awad, who initially seem as alien to him as his new classmates.

Sikh Vikram Chatwal also takes his time to acclimatise to Paris in Vijay Singh's One Dollar Curry (2004), after he is driven from India by the bigoted father of his Hindu fiancée. However, things take an upturn after Haitian fixer Trevor Stephens forges him a reputation as a celebrated chef. Combining European and Bollywood sensibilities without lapsing into caricature, this was infinitely more subtle than the spate of British diaspora pictures released around the same time.

Hanif Kureishi set the tone for British-Asian cinema with his scripts for My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) - which were both directed by Stephen Frears - and Udayan Prasad's My Son the Fanatic (1997). But since the latter examined the troubled lives of illegal Pakistani immigrants in a grim 1960s northern town in Brothers in Trouble (1995), the emphasis has been more on awareness, assimilation and acceptance in feel-good films like David Attwood's Wild West (1992), Damien O'Donnell's East Is East (1999) and Gurinder Chadha's Bhaji on the Beach (1994), Bend It Like Beckham (2002) and Bride and Prejudice (2004).

Adulthood

Despite dramas featuring the likes of Paul Robeson (The Proud Valley, 1940), Earl Cameron (The Heart Within, 1957) and Sidney Poitier (To Sir With Love, 1967), British cinema was slower to come to terms with the country's black population. Works by such pioneering directors as Lionel Ngakane (Jemima + Johnny, 1966), Lloyd Reckord (Ten Bob in Winter, 1963) and Frankie Dymon (Death May Be Your Santa Claus, 1969) were largely overlooked and it took Horace Ové's Pressure (1975) to open the way for increasingly original and contentious Black British features like Anthony Simmons's Black Joy (1977), Menelik Shabazz's Burning an Illusion (1981), John Akomfrah's Who Needs a Heart, Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels (both 1991), Ngozi Onwurah's Welcome II the Terrordome (1995), Julien Henrique's Babymother (1998), Newton I. Aduaka's Rage (1999), Amma Assante's A Way of Life (2004) and Noel Clarke's Adulthood (2008).

Although Nick Broomfield reconstructed the last days of the Chinese cockle pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay in Ghosts (2006) and S.A. Halewood showed how easy it is to shoplift, scam banks and benefits offices, joyride on public transport and sell knock-off phones in his crash-bang adaptation of Pavel Tetersky and Sergei Sakin's prize-winning memoir, Bigga Than Ben: The Russians' Guide to Ripping Off London! (2008), British film-makers are currently most preoccupied with Poles. Taking their cue from Jerzy Skolimowski's Moonlighting (1982), features like Ken Loach's It's a Free World..., Dominic Lees's Outlanders (both 2007) and Shane Meadows's Somers Town (2008) suggest a country at ease with migrants taking jobs repudiated by the working-class.

However, the onset of the credit crunch has prompted a number of protests against imported labor in the UK and it's only a matter of time before someone makes the migrant backlash.

<< Part 5

Go to Part 1 of David Parkinson's Migrant Cinema in the Age of Globalization >>

One Dollar Curry

Migrants have been settling in their adopted homes for centuries and many screen nomads have put down roots of their own.

The Moroccan and Indian families arriving in an isolated village on the edge of Israel's Negev Desert in the late 1960s find ways to rub along together in Avi Nesher's Turn Left At the End of the World (2004), while North Korean wanderer Seo Jung and her stroppy son Shin Dong-ho seem content to share Mongolian Bat-Ulzii's lonely vigil planting trees to stem the slow creep of the steppe sands in Lu Zhang's Desert Dream (2007). And Ukrainian illegal Ingeborga Dapkunaite appears equally ready to make a home in Brussels with van driver Jacques Gamblin in Stéphane Vuillet's 25 Degrees in Winter (2004), following the lead of his Spanish mother, Carmen Maura.

Having relocated from Beirut at the age of 10, Josef Fares is uniquely qualified to discuss being Lebanese in Sweden, which he does amusingly in Jalla! Jalla! (2000) - in which park-keeper Fares Fares has to summon the courage to tell father Jan Fares that he can't enter into an arranged marriage with teenager Laleh Pourkarim because he's dating local lass, Tuva Novotny - and to more dramatic effect in Zozo (2005), as 10 year-old Imad Creidi escapes the civil war that claimed his parents and settles in the southern town of Karlstorp with grandparents Elias Gergi and Yasmine Awad, who initially seem as alien to him as his new classmates.

Sikh Vikram Chatwal also takes his time to acclimatise to Paris in Vijay Singh's One Dollar Curry (2004), after he is driven from India by the bigoted father of his Hindu fiancée. However, things take an upturn after Haitian fixer Trevor Stephens forges him a reputation as a celebrated chef. Combining European and Bollywood sensibilities without lapsing into caricature, this was infinitely more subtle than the spate of British diaspora pictures released around the same time.

Hanif Kureishi set the tone for British-Asian cinema with his scripts for My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) - which were both directed by Stephen Frears - and Udayan Prasad's My Son the Fanatic (1997). But since the latter examined the troubled lives of illegal Pakistani immigrants in a grim 1960s northern town in Brothers in Trouble (1995), the emphasis has been more on awareness, assimilation and acceptance in feel-good films like David Attwood's Wild West (1992), Damien O'Donnell's East Is East (1999) and Gurinder Chadha's Bhaji on the Beach (1994), Bend It Like Beckham (2002) and Bride and Prejudice (2004).

Adulthood

Despite dramas featuring the likes of Paul Robeson (The Proud Valley, 1940), Earl Cameron (The Heart Within, 1957) and Sidney Poitier (To Sir With Love, 1967), British cinema was slower to come to terms with the country's black population. Works by such pioneering directors as Lionel Ngakane (Jemima + Johnny, 1966), Lloyd Reckord (Ten Bob in Winter, 1963) and Frankie Dymon (Death May Be Your Santa Claus, 1969) were largely overlooked and it took Horace Ové's Pressure (1975) to open the way for increasingly original and contentious Black British features like Anthony Simmons's Black Joy (1977), Menelik Shabazz's Burning an Illusion (1981), John Akomfrah's Who Needs a Heart, Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels (both 1991), Ngozi Onwurah's Welcome II the Terrordome (1995), Julien Henrique's Babymother (1998), Newton I. Aduaka's Rage (1999), Amma Assante's A Way of Life (2004) and Noel Clarke's Adulthood (2008).

Although Nick Broomfield reconstructed the last days of the Chinese cockle pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay in Ghosts (2006) and S.A. Halewood showed how easy it is to shoplift, scam banks and benefits offices, joyride on public transport and sell knock-off phones in his crash-bang adaptation of Pavel Tetersky and Sergei Sakin's prize-winning memoir, Bigga Than Ben: The Russians' Guide to Ripping Off London! (2008), British film-makers are currently most preoccupied with Poles. Taking their cue from Jerzy Skolimowski's Moonlighting (1982), features like Ken Loach's It's a Free World..., Dominic Lees's Outlanders (both 2007) and Shane Meadows's Somers Town (2008) suggest a country at ease with migrants taking jobs repudiated by the working-class.

However, the onset of the credit crunch has prompted a number of protests against imported labor in the UK and it's only a matter of time before someone makes the migrant backlash.

<< Part 5

Go to Part 1 of David Parkinson's Migrant Cinema in the Age of Globalization >>