BRICK LANE (2007, dir. Sarah Gavron)

Screening of Brick Lane, directed by Sarah Gavron , who directed Sufragette last year, another exploration of women and their place in society.
Synopsis:
 After her mother kills herself, 17-year old Bangladesh-based Nazneen gets married to 42-year old Chanu Ahmed, and re-locates to Britain circa 1980 to live in Brick Lane, leaving her dad and sister, Hasina, behind. Her sister's letters evoke her carefree life back home.  She dreams of her former life as she is trapped in her loveless marriage. She soon gives birth to two daughters, Rukshana and Bibi. When her husband loses his job, she takes up sewing and meets with Karim, who supplies her dress material, and both get attracted to each other. While racism prevails in the community, especially from white supremacists groups, it escalates after the events of September 11, 2001, compelling a debit-ridden Chanu to consider re-locating back to Dhaka, much to the chagrin of Rukshana.
Questions of identity: 

• Nazneen is a fish out of water in Brick Lane with its brick tenement flats and concrete pavements. The film's poetic opening with scenes of rural Bangladeshi life amid flowing rivers and green fields, accompanied by haunting lyrical music, evokes the idyll that she carries in her heart 
• It represents her true identity. She does not accept her adopted country and she isolates herself until she takes on piece work sewing, which is the first step in her self-development as an independent adult woman. By contrast, at the start, Yasmin successfully balances her two identities, although she keeps them separate and secret from each other: at home she is the dutiful Muslim daughter whilst at work she is an independent young woman with western friends and tastes.
• Brick Lane's identity is represented as being an inward-looking, closed Bengali community that protects itself from outside forces. In fact, Brick Lane residents refused to co-operate with the filming of Mona Ali's novel which they believed represented Bangladeshi identity in a negative light. Yasmin's Keighley seems at first sight to have a more integrated multi-ethnic identity.
• The crunch comes in both Brick Lane and Yasmin after the attacks on the World Trade Center, amid the drum-beat for war and the backlash against Britain’s Muslims.
• Karim's subsequent involvement in anti-racism and local protest meetings triggers Nazneen's political awareness, another strand of her personal development, whereas initially Yasmin fights her brother's radicalization. Both women initially believe that politics is a thing apart from their identities, but soon realise that they need to nail their colours to the flag and declare their loyalties to their ethnic heritage.Yasmin is socially isolated and both suffers and witnesses racial discrimination.
• Until Nazneen meets Karim, her heart is dead and she only dreams of returning home.  Karim awakens another part of her as she experiences passion for the first time. The reverse happens in Yasmin when she rejects the value of personal romantic love in favour of loyalty to her father's and Muslim community's values. Yasmin experiences at first hand the rough treatment meted out to terrorist suspects by the police when she witnesses her husband's imprisonment and then is subject herself to police interrogation. As a result, her sense of her Muslim identity intensifies, she starts to read the Koran and wear traditional clothing.
• In both films, identity is hybrid and dynamic, shaped by outside forces.