England,
1995, 102 min
Shown in 1996
CREDITS
- dir
-
Udayan Prasad
- prod
-
Robert Buckler, George Faber
- scr
-
Robert Buckler
- cam
-
Alan Almond
- editor
-
Barrie Vince
- cast
-
Om Puri, Angeline Ball, Pavan Malhotra, Provesh Kumar, Ahsen Bhatti
- source
-
Jane Balfour Films
- premiere
-
North American Premiere
OTHER
Festival favorite Udayan Prasad returns with a riveting and wholly unpredictable story of illegal immigrants in the U.K. in the ’60s. Refreshingly, Brothers in Trouble is less interested in the exploitation of vulnerable outsiders than in the fragile social infrastructures they invent and embrace. Our entree to this world is Amir (Pavan Malhotra), a shy, scared Pakistani who arrives in a gray northern England factory town in the back of a vegetable truck. Deposited in a congenial yet acutely claustrophobic house of 17 other South Asian men without visas, Amir quickly adapts to his new society. Since the indiscretions of one could jeopardize the entire household, the brood generally accepts the rule of elder Hussein Shah (Om Puri). But when a brassy Irish lass (The Commitments’ Angeline Ball) moves in with Shah, the delicate, volatile balance crumbles under a wave of sexual and cultural tensions. At the height of the tumult, with everything on the line, Amir discards his past and seizes the promise and reality of a new identity. Through his “heroic” journey, Brothers in Trouble brilliantly illuminates the gulf between the customs and loyalties that preserve the way of life in one’s birthplace and the brutal axioms that insure survival in a new country.
—Michael Fox
FACTOID #10
In 1960, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, which has inspired many women to jump into fountains, was pulled from the San Francisco International Film Festival’s program by the distributor and replaced with Roberto Rossellini’s Night over Rome.
