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London Me Bharat
Stylishly-shot document of multicultural 1970s London among Southall's Asian community.
Overview
Stylishly-shot in black and white, London Me Bharat (India in London) - the first Hindi-language film made in Britain - presents a distinctive and sometimes surprising view of 70s London. After a striking opening in which a traditional Indian music soundtrack renders familiar landmarks unfamiliar, the film abandons tourist London to explore Southall, home to one of Britain's largest Indian communities. It's an insightful take on an increasingly multicultural city - at a time when, the commentary tells us, the capital's Indian population numbered some 150,000, with another 300,000 elsewhere in the UK. *To enable subtitles for this film, once playing select CC in the video playback bar (at the bottom of the screen) and select Closed Captions = On.*
London Me Bharat was the debut film of director, producer and actor Vinod Pande, whose Indian films include Star (1982), Ek Naya Rishta (1988) and Red Swastik (2007). Pande spent some 15 years in London from the late 1960s, working at the Department of Inland Revenue and the BBC World Service before completing his London-set first feature, Ek Baar Phir (Once Again, 1979).
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