The British teenager Sajid of Pakistani descent refuses to go to school because of the bullying of his peers, his father feels that there is an identity disorder in his son, so he decides to accompany him on a trip to Pakistan to learn about his origins there, while the father searches for a bride for his other son Manar. Once they reach his father's homeland, Sajid is amazed by the sights he sees that began when he stepped off the plane and the primitive way of collecting bags, cows and camels in the streets.
Challenges begin to arise when many families are reluctant to agree to Manar marrying off their daughters for fear that the son will do as the father did, leaving his Pakistani wife and marrying an English one in the British film "West is the West" directed by Andy Dimony and produced in 2011.
West is west (The Island)
The film is the second part with most of the same cast for another film, East is East, directed by Damien O'Donnell in 1999, which shows the same family during the seventies in the Salford area of Manchester, England. Both films are typical of so-called diaspora cinema, which expresses multicultural films as defined by the University of Oxford Dictionary of Film Studies, and represents films produced in the post-colonial period that deal with the issues of immigrants living in the West with their second- and third-generation descendants.
East is east (Al Jazeera)
The first part dealt with the situation of the family with a Pakistani father and an English mother, family problems, integration with British society and the relationship between spouses of different stripes, unlike the second part, which was produced 10 years later and moved the experience to another angle, the original society of the father in Pakistan, to shed light on the interaction of this society with the second generation of immigrants who want to reconnect the family and build marriage relationships there; here other cultural and social challenges arise other than the first part.
Although both films deal with characters belonging to the local Muslim community, the central issues they address go far beyond the religious framework and penetrate deeply into the cultural dysfunction and identity challenges that plague multicultural families in Western society. Moreover, both films are comedies and therefore appeal to large audiences ready to eat this humorous meal full of hearty issues. These films are therefore important works that universities show students studying issues of identity and multiculturalism in Britain.
Another popular film in diaspora cinema is the 1991 American film "Mississippi Masala" by Indian-American director Mira Nair, which tells the story of a wealthy Indian family with large investments in Uganda before President Idi Amin comes to power and the family loses its property and goes to live in the Mississippi Basin in the United States, after which their daughter has a romantic relationship with a young black man of Ugandan descent and the family objects to their marriage.
These three films are an expression of two major East-to-West migrations of the 20th century: the first was migration during the fifties and sixties from Pakistan (and Bangladesh, then part of Pakistan) to Britain, which encouraged labor to rebuild the country after World War II, and the second was after the coup of former Ugandan President Idi Amin in 1971 and his orders to strip citizenship and expel tens of thousands of Ugandans of Asian descent, joining Britain, Canada, the United States and others. States.
My cultures of the Matn and the margin
Diaspora cinema is more than just a type of film and cinema because it restructures the overall look and feel of the film. Cinematic work often belongs artistically and culturally to a specific country and culture in terms of language and identity, while diaspora cinema films are a hybrid product that combines two or more cultures. In "West is West", we hear two languages, English and Urdu, and we hear two dialects of English, one of which is the language of the people of England and the other is the Asian dialect, and the same applies to clothing, filming locations and music.
Dr. Laura Marks argues in her book "The Appearance of the Film" that culture replaces the nation in these films because they are transnational films, that nationalist discourse fails to express the state of the diaspora, and that the issues of these films are very similar because they focus on questions of race, culture, identity, colonialism, capitalism and any related themes. Marx adds that the prevalence of these films in a number of countries is not removed by the fact that they did not realistically reflect that cultural cross-fertilization does not take place in normal conditions of political exchange, but in the context of a dominant host culture and a subordinate minority.
This means that we are facing a cinematic embodiment of the cultures of the Metn, which is the culture of the majority, and the cultures of the margin, which is the culture of the minority, and whatever the opportunities and possibilities of this margin, it remains marginal and the Metn remains dead, even in the field of financing film production. Many government-subsidized programs require that the film reflect the local culture, meaning that such films often fail to secure sufficient funding to be screened and then resort to funding from other countries, with East is East and West is West an exception because the former was funded by Britain's Channel Four and the latter by the BBC.
This cinematic state leads us to the question of the role of the arts in expressing the lost identity state or conflict of identities in diaspora communities. There is great difficulty in explaining the matter theoretically to any circles outside these societies, even to the majority of people, because the issue requires experience and subjective experience in order to find out the reality of complex issues, and here comes the role of cinema to refer these complex issues into a visual language that is more eloquent to express what is simmering in the breasts of millions.