British Muslims After 9/11 in Yasmin (2004)

Claudia Sternberg Babylon North: British Muslims after 9/11 in Yasmin (2004) This contribution offers a reading of the film Yasmin which tells the story of the impact the events of 9/11 and their aftermath have on a young British Pakistani woman, her family and community in northern England. The paper analyses the narrative’s juxtaposition of the main characters’ translocal existence with the global discourses of terrorism and Islamism as well as the title character’s struggle to re-evaluate and re-assert her identity as a Muslim woman in the wake of increasing Islamophobia. Furthermore, it discusses the filmmakers’ ethnographic approach to their subject-matter and the significance of an unstaged scene highlighted by mainstream reviewers. Finally, it is argued that Yasmin – despite its temporal and geographical specificity – continues and recodes a previously established narrative tradition of social exclusion and racist policing which is more closely connected with black British cinema of the 1970s and 1980s than with Asian British films of the 1990s and 2000s. 1. Background and Production Context In the 1990s and 2000s, a number of Asian-themed feature films were made by white and/or Asian British writers and directors; most of them – including the popular East is East (1999, dir. Damien O’Donnell) and Bend It Like Beckham (2002, dir. Gurinder Chadha), but also the lesser known debut features Bollywood Queen (2002, dir. Jeremy Wooding), Halal Harry (2006, dir. Russell Razzaque) and Nina’s Heavenly Delights (2006, dir. Pratibha Parmar) – can be classed as dramatic comedies. Within this genre, secular lifestyles and indulgence in popular culture – Western or Eastern – are presented as positive and liberating and conflict is resolved through humour and compromise. Central to the films’ narratives are interethnic relationships of the second generation, which symbolise a permissive and multiculturalist Britain. They are also found in the social realist dramas Ae Fond Kiss (2004, dir. Ken Loach) and Love + Hate (2006, dir. Dominic Savage), which draw, however, a less reconciliatory picture of contemporary race relations. In an earlier production, My Son the Fanatic (1997, dir. Udayan Prasad), interethnic romance occurs between a first generation migrant and a younger white woman, but breaks down between the migrant’s son and his fiancée. In the film discussed here, Kenny Glenaan’s Yasmin (2004), successful relationships between white and Asian Britons are either absent or doomed to fail. Set in northern England in 2001, the story of a young British Pakistani woman shows the negative impact which 9/11 has on herself, her family and community. Two 80 Claudia Sternberg other British productions, The Hamburg Cell (2004, dir. Antonia Bird) and Infinite Justice (2006, dir. Jamil Dehlavi), specifically address 9/11. While these focus on events outside the UK and characters investigating or operating from within terrorist networks, Yasmin tackles the situation of ordinary Muslims resident in Britain since the terrorist attacks. Perhaps in tandem with A Way of Life (2004), Amma Asante’s film about white poverty and violent racism in Wales, Yasmin must be regarded as one of the most pessimistic filmic representations of multi-ethnic Britain in the post-9/11 era. Yasmin was funded by Scottish Screen, Channel 4, Screen Yorkshire and the German co-producer EuroArts. The film was directed by Kenny Glenaan, a white Scotsman who had previously made Gas Attack (2001) about violence against the Kurdish community in Glasgow, and written by Yorkshireman Simon Beaufoy, the screenwriter of The Full Monty (1997, dir. Peter Cattaneo), which addressed the plight of unemployed steelworkers in Sheffield. Yasmin was shot in 2003 on cost-effective digital video and blown up to 35mm for theatrical screenings. In 2004, the film was received favourably at the festivals in Edinburgh and Venice, won the audience award at Dinard as well as the prize of the ecumenical jury at Locarno. It was shown in the cinema in a number of European countries and its success on the festival circuit opened up the market for distribution in the UK. On account of the film’s topicality, rather than waiting for a distributor to secure an opening for theatrical release, the production team opted to have it broadcast on Channel 4 as a one-off television drama in January 2005 (with a repeat in August of the same year) and to make it available on DVD. Both Glenaan and Beaufoy see themselves as working in the tradition of the British filmmaker Ken Loach and, in Yasmin, they collaborated with Sally Hibbin who had also produced several of Loach’s films in the 1990s. Loach’s work is echoed in the film’s emphasis on ordinary people experiencing ex- traordinary pressure, its regional and social specificity and the use of original locations, professional and lay actors and improvisation. To heighten the film’s realism further, Yasmin’s narrative was constructed from information gathered in consultations with British Pakistani communities in northern England. A number of workshops ran over the period of one year and were set up with the aid of Katy Jones, a producer of the former current affairs TV programme World in Action. Glenaan’s original plan was to follow up on the disturbances in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley of July 2001 which had brought young Asian and white men to the streets and led to serious clashes with the police. Yasmin’s production notes state: What emerged at first was a story about the riots that happened in Oldham and Bradford just before September 11th and the continuing mistakes made by the council and local/national .

Load more