Le Grand Voyage (France/Morocco 2004)

 

Father and son wait at customs control in Le Grand Voyage

I thought this film was much more interesting than some of the rather sniffy reviews that appeared at the time. Le grand voyage won various prizes around the world, including one at Venice and was then dubbed a conventional ‘festival film’ or, worse, a ‘road movie’. To be fair, however, lots of people clearly enjoyed it as much as I did. I don’t accept that recognition of a film as a road movie means that it won’t be an interesting film.

The plot is very simple. A Moroccan who has lived in France for 30 years decides that the time has come to make the hajj to Mecca. But instead of flying or going by sea to Saudi Arabia, he opts to go by car, commanding his younger son Reda to drive him. Reda is due to take his high school exams for the second time and is upset to be parted from his French girlfriend, Lisa. The pair set off in a reconditioned Peugeot estate supplied by Reda’s older brother. It is indeed a classic ‘road trip’ with two travelling companions who have little in common and barely speak to each other. Many of the elements of the road movie are covered – strange, unannounced extra passengers, comic misadventures etc. – and the overall thematic about characters learning about each other and about themselves through the adventures. Yet, it isn’t anything like an American road movie, or one across any other large country. One of the important narrative threads is the change in the sense of which of the two characters is ‘in control’ of the journey. At first Reda is comfortable driving in France and Italy – although he still has to obey his father, he is still justified in chastising the old man who gets them lost because he can’t read maps. But as they cross the Balkans it slowly becomes apparent that Reda’s French culture is less and less useful – while the father becomes more capable of sensible decision-making.

For any monoglot English speaker, it is rather chastening to think that Reda actually speaks three languages – French, some English and the Moroccan Arabic of his family. But because he has rejected Islam and his Arab heritage, he doesn’t know the classical or the ‘Egyptian Arabic’ that is more useful travelling the back roads of Syria and Jordan. His father has this and is anyway much more comfortable dealing with the farmers and local villagers they meet on the way. The last part of the film deals with the pair’s arrival in Mecca. Many of the reviews find this the most interesting part of the story – especially the crowd scenes. I’m not sure that these scenes are that unusual in news footage terms, but it is true that for a fictional story to include such scenes is very rare (probably unique). I would certainly agree that the closing scenes of the narrative are important. Once again, it’s quite interesting to compare the ending with the generic conventions of the road movie. What have the two characters learned/achieved? For me, although the personal stories were interesting, I was more taken by the commentary which emerged about the whole issue of ‘North-South’ relationships and the process of migration. For the last thirty years, the assumption has been that migrants have travelled from the ‘South’ (i.e. North Africa) to Western Europe to find employment, just as Reda’s father presumably did. But now with EU membership opening up to Eastern Europe and eventually the Balkans and Turkey, the definitions need to change. The old man, not the 2nd generation ‘French man’ who is his son, moves more freely through what might soon become the new extended Europe. Allied to this, the director, French-Moroccan Ismaël Ferroukhi  has said that he wanted to represent a new sense of the wider Muslim community – one which dealt with the majority of community-minded Muslims travelling to Mecca, not the minority involved in conflict. I think he succeeds.

Black History Month: Babymother (UK 1998)

Wil Johnson as Byron and Anjela Lauren Smith as Anita

Babymother is one of the few Black British films to receive a UK release of any kind since the 1980s, but even so, it is likely to be better known abroad where it was shown in festivals. In the UK it received only a very limited distribution and has been seen mainly on Channel 4 television. The first TV airings showed cropped images from what is a widescreen (CinemaScope) film musical (which bizarrely links it to the early Cliff Richard ‘Scope musicals such as The Young Ones (1961). The film represents a conscious attempt to avoid the typical ‘burden of representation’ that sits heavily on Black British films – it isn’t concerned with the ‘problems of life in the inner city associated with racism and deprivation’. Instead it celebrates one aspect of Jamaican life in London – ‘dancehall’, with its distinctive musical style and dramatic costumes.

A Jamaican film, Dancehall Queen (made on digital video by the legendary Don Letts) was released in the UK in 1997 and did good business in South London. This may have influenced Henriques. Some critics have also suggested that Babymother may owe something to the look and feel of Bollywood. Henriques himself speaks about the long tradition of specifically Jamaican culture including the links to the Saturday night ‘blues’ party which often carried over into Sunday church.

The film is set in Harlesden, the western part of the London Borough of Brent, arguably an area of London that has been defined through successive generations of new communities – Irish, African Caribbean and Asian. The plot sees a young single mother (the ‘babymother’) – Anita, a beautiful talented singer who has not found the confidence to assert herself in the dancehall culture, especially when she has felt herself in the shadow of the ‘babyfather’, Byron, played by Wil Johnson (now a leading UK TV actor). But when Byron steals one of her lyrics, she finally decides to take him on in the competitive arena of the dancehall. The film plays this narrative from the musical (which sees characters bursting into song as in the classical musical as well as in the dancehall) against a more familiar family melodrama about Anita’s mother and older sister. This has an interesting twist. A full synopsis and commentary is available on Screenonline. Though the Screenonline account is accurate, I don’t think it quite picks up the unique qualities of the film. Certainly this is a film to divide audiences. If you are expecting the usual ’social realist’ drama about inner-city London, you’ll be disappointed. But if you like the idea of a vibrant musical with some reality thrown in, I think it works. If you don’t know about dancehall, it is extremely colourful with the performers wearing outlandish costumes (a bit like the carnival costumes seen at Notting Hill or other Caribbean carnival events). It is a completely Black musical, with no white characters as such. Screenonline suggests that this is a weakness, but it seems fine to me. A TV series called Babyfather appeared in 2001. There was no direct connection between the film and the series which both focus on the concept of single parents, but Wil Johnson also appeared in the first episode of the TV series.

Anita and the children

Writer-director Julian Henriques was born in Yorkshire. He studied psychology at Bristol University and worked as a lecturer, policy researcher, and journalist before becoming a television researcher. In the 1970s, he started the journal Ideology and Consciousness (later I and C) with a group of young psychologists and social theorists. Their aim was to bring together critical work in psychology with work on the subject and subjectivity coming out of European social theory (structuralism, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis), as well as continental feminism. He has made documentaries for LWT, the BBC and with his own production company for Channel Four. We the Ragamuffin (1992) was his first narrative short film, Babymother his first feature film. Henriques taught film and television at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, and currently works at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Here is his staff page at Goldsmiths.

Producer Parminder Vir began her career in 1978 as an Arts Administrator with the Minority Arts Advisory Service, moving to the Commonwealth Institute and eventually becoming Head of the Race Equality Unit in the Arts and Recreation Department of the GLC. In 1986, she moved into film-making and began working as a researcher for the BBC. She set up her own production company in 1994 and produced several award-winning programmes. In 1996 she had joined Carlton Television as a Consultant to the Director of Programmes, implementing a strategy for achieving cultural diversity on and behind the screen. Since 1998 she has become a leading figure in the film and television industries, serving as a UK Film Council Board Member from 1999-2005 and setting up Ingenious World Cinema to aid production of films from “emerging markets, including India, China, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina and the Diaspora” as part of the larger Ingenious Media. (She is also married to Julian Henriques.) 

Amazon shows that there are still some copies of the Film Four DVD available.

(Notes updated from a screening in 2002)

Black History Month: Introduction

October is ‘Black History Month’ in the UK. It’s a celebration of the importance of Africa and its peoples and diaspora around the world. The US has a month in February, but in the UK, October became established after an initiative by the late (and very lamented in these parts) Greater London Council in the 1980s. You can find out more at the Black History Month website. 

Having noticed the celebrations over the last few years, which now occur not only in London but across the UK, we decided to celebrate the month by focusing on some of the films from Africa, North America and Europe that deal with African culture and diaspora culture. We are compiling lists of interesting films and also intending to review one or two significant titles.

To kick off, we’d like to celebrate the latest film to receive the restoration treatment organised by the Martin Scorsese-backed World Cinema Foundation. This was announced at Cannes in May and a further news item appeared in the Observer today highlighting a screening at the London Film Festival. The film in question is Touki Bouki, directed in Senegal in 1973 by Djibril Diop Mambéty.

Touki Bouki

Touki Bouki is an important film for several reasons, but most of all because it proved that African filmmakers could make a diverse range of different kinds of films, including those that were seen as ‘avant garde’, but also as youth pictures with a ‘New Wave’ feel. A pair of young lovers attempt to leave Senegal and have adventures presented in an unconventional narrative structure. The pdf downloadable from the World Cinema Foundation website above has a short statement from the great Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé:

Djibril left his country with the dream of finding success and solace in Europe. He soon discovered, however, the cruelty of life. While his dream fell apart little by little Djibril found he was unable to leave “Europe”, his host country. That was when returning to Africa became the real dream for him. Ending his days in Africa was a dream he would never fulfill.

Touki Bouki is a prophetic film. Its portrayal of 1973 Senegalese society is not too different from today’s reality. Hundreds of young Africans die every day at the Strait of Gibraltar trying to reach Europe (Melilla and Ceuta). Who has never heard of that before? 

All their hardships find their voice in Djibril’s film: the young nomads who think they can cross the desert ocean and find their own lucky star and happiness but are disappointed by the human cruelty they encounter. Touki Bouki is a beautiful, upsetting and unexpected film that makes us question ourselves.

The restoration has involved a digital process to recover the colour range of the original. This is at the 2K international standard and a 35 mm interneg has been produced at the end of the process. The restoration was carried out by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory. It sounds wonderful, so if you get the chance, check out the LFF. The film screens at 18.30 on 24 October.

A second film spotted in today’s Observer also deserves mention. Babylon is a British film from 1980 featuring a fantastic cast of young Black British acting talent, many of them also leading musicians. Brinsley Forde, lead singer of Aswad and former child actor plays a reggae DJ with a sound system. He and his crew face plenty of obstacles as they fight a ‘battle of the bands’, not least the racism endemic in London at the time. The music was overseen by Denis Bovell and the cast also includes Trevor Laird and Victor Romero Evans (as well as a host of other British TV regulars). For the last couple of years there has been an Italian DVD available of dubious provenance (not certificated for the UK):

Here is the trailer for the Italian version:

 

Now there is a new UK DVD from Icon Home Entertainment. In 1980 the film was rated ‘X’, now it is a ‘15′.

If the film is not directed or written by a Black filmmaker, does that invalidate its status as a film to be celebrated as part of Black History Month? I don’t think so – my memory is of a film that felt authentic for the streets of London in 1980 and an important assertion of Black British culture. I’m looking forward to watching it again. There’s a useful Guardian plug for the film here, commenting on director Franco Rosso’s pedigree as a filmmaker representing the UK reggae scene on film.

European Box Office Data 2007

One of our aims on the blog is to promote ‘cross border’ knowledge about films. Outside Hollywood, many films only circulate in their own domestic market or associated language markets. Films have to be sold to distributors for different territories. There are reasons why sales don’t take place for some titles, but sometimes it is just a matter of luck or timing – whereas Hollywood films are often sold to affiliates/partners of the US studio distributor.

It is relatively straightforward to discover what is happening in Europe since there is good quality data available from several sources including the Lumiere Database, Cineuropa and Focus. These sources collate data from across the EU (and sometimes beyond to the ‘Europe of 36′). The only slight problem is that UK box office data is usually expressed as box office revenue. This has to be converted into approximate admissions data to match the European convention.

Here is the Top 25 European-produced films of 2007 (taken from Focus 2008)

(Showing title, producing country, year, director and admissions)

1 Mr. Bean’s Holiday GB/FR/DE/US 2007 Steve Bendelack 15,251,106
2 La Môme FR/CZ/GB 2007 Olivier Dahan 7,225,794
3 Taxi 4 FR 2007 Gérard Krawczyk 5,334,716
4 Hot Fuzz GB/FR/US 2007 Edgar Wright 4,849,649
5 Das Leben der Anderen DE 2006 F. H. von Donnersmarck 4,057,710 (a further 1.8 million admissions in 2006)
6 Ensemble, c’est tout FR 2007 Claude Berri 3,304,303
7 Manuale d’amore 2 (Capitoli successivi) IT 2007 Giovanni Veronesi 3,134,777
8 Natale in crociera IT 2007 Neri Parenti 3,074,353
9 Atonement GB/FR/US 2007 Joe Wright 3,059,096
10 Arthur et les Minimoys FR 2006 Luc Besson 2,902,293 (a further 4.8 million in 2006)
11 Lissi und der wilde Kaiser DE 2007 Michael Herbig 2,751,339
12 Katyn PL 2007 Andrzej Wajda 2,735,777
13 Elizabeth: The Golden Age GB/FR/DE 2007 Shekhar Kapur 2,686,064
14 Die Wilden Kerle 4 DE 2007 Joachim Masannek 2,655,249
15 Ho voglia di te IT 2007 Luis Prieto 2,309,624
16 Una Moglie bellissima IT 2007 Leonardo Pieraccioni 2,306,726
17 The Last King of Scotland GB/DE 2006 Kevin Macdonald 2,250,156
18 Run Fatboy Run GB/US 2007 David Schwimmer 2,202,040
19 Notte prima degli esami – Oggi IT 2007 Fausto Brizzi 2,057,238
20 Notes on a Scandal GB 2006 Richard Eyre 2,052,873
21 Hitman FR/US 2007 Xavier Gens 2,038,333
22 Beyaz melek TR 2007 Mahsun Kirmizigül 1,995,040
23 Eastern Promises GB/US/CA 2007 David Cronenberg 1,940,419
24 28 Weeks Later GB/ES 2007 Juan Carlos Fresnadillo 1,873,720
25 Le Coeur des hommes 2 FR 2007 Marc Esposito 1,846,351

The chart does not include the UK/US films designated ‘Inward investment’ by the UKFC, so no Harry Potter or The Golden Compass etc.

In many ways, the chart offers what you might expect with most of the films coming from the four biggest economies – Germany, France, Italy and the UK. There is no Spanish entry, which signals the recent decline of Spanish domestic production. (However, there must be a mistake in compiling the chart as the horror film El Orfanato was released in October 2007 attracting over 4 million admissions – nevertheless, Spain has recently seen a real decline in domestic successes.)

What is perhaps surprising is the relatively high position of the Italian entries, signalling something of a resurgence in domestic production. Note also the high position for Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn and the entry of a Turkish film, Beyaz melek, which made money in Germany and the UK as well as Turkey and some other non-EU countries.

There is some American money involved in European majority co-productions, but it is significant that several of the films here are co-productions involving UK, France or Germany.

The real importance of the chart for our purposes is to note how many/few of the films have been released widely in Europe. A rough calculation suggests around a half of these titles have been released in more than two or three European countries.

The films that are assumed not to travel are usually comedies. Manuale d’amore 2 (Capitoli successivi) is, as the title implies, a sequel to a previous hit in Italy. IMDB describes it as a ‘comedy romance’ and lists it as opening in Spain in 2007 and Greece (and South Korea) in 2008. At the moment, it is only showing Italy on the Lumiere database. (The film does have a star known acroos Europe in the form of Monica Belucci). Much the same goes for Natale in crociera. The other three Italian films are all comedies. The two German films at nos. 11 and 14 are also comedies, but only released in Germany and Austria. IMDB rates all these films very low on the 10 point scale, but presumably somebody out of the millions who saw the films enjoyed them? How do we take account of these productions in terms of European Cinema?

The Turkish film Beyaz melek is rather different. It appears to be an ‘epic drama’ about people in a retirement home in Eastern Turkey and is the first directorial effort by a Turkish singer. The film played to diaspora Turkish audiences in at least Germany and the UK and possibly other European countries as well. In the UK, the screenings were at Wood Green Cineworld and Lee Valley Odeon in North East London. I for one would be very interested in seeing this film with English subtitles.

The crunch film in the list is Katyn. Poland has both a potentially large domestic market and a large number of Poles both temporarily and permanently overseas. In the UK, Dogwoof has imported Polish films (see our review of Wesele). However, Andrzej Wajda is not only the doyen of Polish filmmakers, but also a world figure. There was some dismay when a rumour began that the major arthouse distributor in the UK did not want to buy Katyn, seeing it as ‘old-fashioned’. Now it seems it will be released in the next few months. The story, about the massacre of Polish Army officers by the Russians in 1940, is both a ‘national story’ for the Poles and a personal story for Wajda (whose father was one of the officers killed). The UK has missed out on similar films before (e.g. Wajda’s Pan Tadeusz in 1999).

The distributors may well be correct in their commercial judgment about how films will travel, but Hollywood has persevered and sold us dross. Perhaps European distributors could be more adventurous?

(As of 3 August, I have been unable to confirm that Katyn has got a UK distributor, so the statement above should be ignored until further notice.)

Auf der anderen Seite (Germany/Turkey 2007)

At last a day off and the chance to watch some movies. In fact it started the night before when I saw Juno, but Friday was the day when I managed to see the new print of Bertolucci’s The Conformist and the new Fatih Akin, ‘On the other side‘.

I enjoyed The Conformist, especially because of the performance by Jean-Louis Trintignant and the sumptuous mise en scène. It is wonderful to return to the films of 1970 and to embrace a cinema that could mix a traditional story with a strong sense of atmosphere and no worries about narrative. But it is equally wonderful to watch a contemporary movie as riveting as the Fatih Akin.

As an aside, I was not impressed by the cinema showing the film. The Curzon Soho is supposedly the premiere UK art cinema, but it isn’t a patch on the Cubby Broccoli or Pictureville at Bradford. I really don’t like a cinema where you have to look up to the screen (the Prince Charles off Leicester Square is the worst offender – but I haven’t been there for a while, perhaps it has changed?). Which means that is even more impressive that Auf der anderen seite can so exert its power. I’m now seriously considering how I can get to Istanbul by train.

I found this film much less aggressive and ‘hard’ than Akin’s previous film Head On, but equally moving. I hadn’t expected the Tom Tykwer style coincidences to be so important and I loved the sequence in which characters in a car pass a train carrying other important characters – two narratives interconnecting without the protagonists’ knowledge. Great too, to have such an open ending. I just hope that the deal with Sky Box Office pays off and that more people get to see the film this way – I just worry that it won’t get seen in cinemas by more traditional arthouse audiences if the digital pay per view release cuts the number of film prints in distribution.

A useful review article on the film by Thomas Elsaesser is on the Film Comment website.

Gegen die Wand (Head-On, Germany/Turkey 2003)

The 'chorus' in Head-On

Director Fatih Akin (b. 1973) is one of the exciting new talents of German cinema. Growing up in a Turkish community in Hamburg he studied Visual Communications and started making short films in the mid 1990s, immediately attracting attention and prizes. Head-On, his fourth fiction feature, won the 2004 Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. There were some comments that perhaps the Berlin Festival was celebrating its own, but the power of the film is undeniable. This is not obviously an ‘art’ film. Akin’s previous features were rooted in the crime and comedy genres and Head-On has a broad appeal as a (in places quite brutal) ‘tragedy-comedy romance’.

The two central characters are both, like Akin, Turks living in Hamburg. Cahit is a 40 something man whose life has been destroyed by the death of his wife and Sibel is a young woman from a deeply conservative Turkish family who is desperate to escape and ‘live’ the life of a liberated young woman in Hamburg. They meet in a psychiatric ward after Cahit has driven his old car into a wall and Sibel has attempted suicide by slitting her wrists. Sibel pleads with Cahit to let her marry him so that she can escape her family. Eventually, he is persuaded to go through with the plan – but the outcome is perhaps not what was expected.

Like several other European directors, Akin is a fan of Jim Jarmusch and of popular music. But Head-On is seemingly uncontrolled with outbursts of violence and almost slapstick humour. Yet it is also a highly intelligent film, both in terms of subject and plotting and in presentation. Cahit was born in Turkey but has lived long enough in Germany to have forgotten both the nuances of Turkish as a language and its cultural mores. Sibel was born in Germany, but her family’s attachment to Turkish culture means that to carry through her plan, Cahit must act like a conventional Turkish suitor. The scenes covering the proposal and the wedding milk the cross-cultural misunderstandings for the same kinds of easy laughs that characterised a British film like East is East (UK 1999). Although a big commercial hit, East is East had its disturbing moments and Head-On too, soon undermines easy laughter with much darker representations.

Questions of Turkish and German identity are to some extent indicated by use of language. British audiences may miss some of this if they don’t notice when characters switch from German to Turkish and vice versa. For instance, in one early scene when Cahit and Sibel are arguing violently on a late night bus about the possibility of a marriage, they are ejected by the bus driver, a Turkish man who calls them ‘godless dogs’ (in Turkish) after they have been arguing in German. In the second half of the film the action moves to Turkey and in order to communicate effectively with an important character who is a manager in a large Istanbul hotel, Cahit switches to English.

Amongst all the techniques derived from genre cinema, Akin also employs a typical Brechtian device in the form of a music ensemble, dressed formally and traditionally, on the shore of the Bosphorus where they perform a number of traditional songs. These form chapter markers, seemingly commenting on the narrative. Neither a wholly mainstream genre picture, nor a realist art film, Head-On works as both a strong entertainment and a commentary on the new Europe of crossing frontiers and forging new identities – or of rediscovering roots and identities. Perhaps not surprisingly, Head-On proved a popular success in both Germany and Turkey. Its festival success led to a wider distribution (including to the UK) than most of the other films made within or about Germany’s immigrant communities. Around 20 million of Germany’s 82 million population are officially ‘of foreign descent’, including 2.3 million Turks.

Roy Stafford (Adapted from evening class notes, first written in March 2007)

The name game

I blogged my reactions to The Namesake when I first saw it in May this year. You can check out the blog here. On a second viewing it worked just as well, but I got even more from it. I’ve softened a little on Kal Penn’s performance, but I’m now an even bigger fan of Tabu and Irrfan Khan (the star of Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart, despite Angelina Jolie’s top billing).

This time I was more conscious of how clever the script is with the references to names and naming and also the extent to which Mira Nair pays hommage to Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak (and makes Bengali jokes). The central question is, I think, how the film creates a delicious tension between its focus on Ashima as against the father-son relationship. I’m still not sure who is at the centre of the story. What does anyone else think?

Pen Pictures of directors (1): India

Some directors who will feature on the course, who you may wish to investigate:

Deepa Mehta
This Canadian director was born in Amritsar in the Punjab and emigrated after getting her degree in philosophy from Delhi University. She started directing aged 40 in Canada and she is best known internationally for her trilogy of films set in India. This ‘elemental trilogy’ deals with issues relevant to women in Indian society. Fire (1996) looks at a marriage in which a young woman discovers that her husband has married her for convenience and she is drawn into a relationship with her sister-in-law.

Earth (1998) concerns the fate of families caught up in the struggles over Indian partition in 1947 in a story seen from the perspective of a young girl and Water (2005) focuses on the fate of a child bride who is widowed and forced to live in a house with other widows in 1930s Benares. An important aspect of Deepa Mehta’s work is her casting of Shabana Azmi, one of Indian Cinema’s leading female stars, who has herself undertaken several campaigns on feminist issues. Another star, Nandita Das appeared in the first two films of the trilogy and would have joined Shabana Azmi if production on Water had not been halted by the disruption caused by Hindu fundamentalist protestors. For more about Water, read the brief review on our associate blog.

Mira Nair
Born in Orissa, Mira Nair also went to North America to train as a documentary filmmaker, basing herself in the US. She began directing in her early twenties, but first came to international attention with Salaam Bombay in 1988, a documentary-drama about streetchildren in Bombay, funded by public and private investors in India, Channel 4 in the UK and a French production company. In 1991 she made Mississippi Masala, about an inter-racial affair between the daughter of East African Indian immigrants (played by Sarita Choudhury) and an African-American man in the Southern US (played by Denzil Washington). After some less successful films, she finally had a major hit with Monsoon Wedding in 2001, which married the conventions of very different forms of cinema – the loose visual style of European and American Independent Cinema with the intensity of Indian Parallel Cinema and the exuberance of Bollywood.

In 2004 Reese Witherspoon starred in Mira Nair’s adaptation of Vanity Fair, which perhaps didn’t get the big audiences it deserved, and in 2006 she directed The Namesake which we will be screening on the course. Again, there is a a brief review of this film on our associate blog.

Although Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta have similar backgrounds and are both ‘diaspora filmmakers’ returning to India to make films, the films themselves look and feel quite different. Deepa Mehta’s films might seem to be more concerned with ‘issues’ and her Indian films have something of the qualities of Indian ‘Parallel Cinema’, the socially conscious ‘alternative cinema’ of the 1970s-80s. This makes Water, with its use of music by A. R. Rahman, the leading composer of Indian popular cinema, particularly interesting as a development. By contrast, Mira Nair seems less concerned with specific issues and more concerned with characters, often, but not always, women. If Mira Nair is a more ‘popular’ director, it is because she chooses to work in ways more associated with popular genre cinema — particularly genres associated with female audiences, such as romance, family saga, melodrama etc.

Both directors have consistently worked with women in prominent production roles. Not surprisingly, women are very often writers, editors and production designers — but none of the films mentioned above are photographed by women. Lydia Dean Pilcher has been Mira Nair’s producer on most of her films.