Words and Interview by Peter Fraser
What is Nina’s Heavenly Delights about and what does it mean for you?
It’s a personal film, a film that I’ve been passionate about for the last six years. The story is inspired by my own life experiences. I was determined to make this film and the last six years have been an incredible learning experience as a filmmaker both in terms of how difficult it is to get your first feature film made and also how much more difficult it is when that film is a Scottish lesbian curry romance! I was quite shocked by the reactions of some of the distributors and exhibitors. Although it’s not an in-your-face lesbian film - it’s quite subtle in its treatment of homosexuality - nevertheless it seemed to be a stumbling block for many financiers. The UK Film Council said that one of the problems with the story was that ‘lesbianism has had its sell-by date’, as if lesbians were a brand of cereal!
The film is in some ways reminiscent of films like East is East and The Full Monty in its warm heart, its sense of humour, the way it deals with a particular locale and culture, tradition and modernity…
One of the reasons that I set the film in Glasgow was because I wanted to challenge notions of national identity and ethnicity. I think that during the last decade ethnic, religious and political identities have become so paramount as signifiers of all kinds of divisions and animosities in the world. I wanted to make a story that actually was not dependent on the national, cultural, racial, religious or sexual identities of the characters in the film. They are human beings and all of their journeys have universal resonances.
I think it’s safe to say that the story and the characters are likely to have a universal appeal. Going back to your point about the homosexuality in the film and the fact that this was a problem for funders, I think that some people might find that surprising. It’s interesting that you say that the funders thought that homosexuality was over as an issue. It seems a very strange perspective…?
Well I think that it is a very strange perspective because ultimately the film is a love story and the love story just happens to be between two women. Would they say that about a romantic comedy presented to them in which a man fell in love with a woman or a boy fell in love with a girl? ‘Has heterosexuality had its sell-by date?’ was the question that immediately sprang to my mind when I read the response from The Film Council. I think that it was surprising but in a way I think that when you really get down to the brass tacks homophobia still exists. Yes we now have civil partnerships in this country but there are many countries where homosexuality is still illegal. For example in India it’s illegal. In some countries people are stoned to death because of their sexuality so I think that there’s something very contradictory going on. On the one hand legal and cultural advances have been made and there’s greater liberalisation in attitudes towards homosexuality but at the same time I think the reality is that deeply entrenched hetero-normative attitudes are still very much enshrined within institutions. Unfortunately a lot of funding decisions are made by people I would call ‘pale males’ of a certain age. Their day-to-day reality is very far removed from mine or a huge number of other people’s. So if they don’t see themselves reflected back, either racially or culturally, in the scripts that they read they say, ‘Well you know I can’t really identify with this.’ So their personal judgements get in the way of their funding decisions and that’s not only to do with sexuality but I know from the experience of other Black and Asian filmmakers in the UK that they have a really hard time.
It interesting to speculate as to what ‘diversity’ actually amounts to in the British film industry given that it’s a catchphrase that’s bandied about a great deal…
Well I’m quite happy to say that from my experience and the experience of many other Black and Asian filmmakers that I know, it really is purely lip service. So many Black and Asian filmmakers have gone to The Film Council, the public body that has been set up to encourage British filmmaking, for funding either as individuals or very small companies, but the way that the institution now works is that a lot of their funding goes to already established companies. There is this hole that a lot of filmmakers fall into because we’re individuals trying to make our films who aren’t necessarily aligned with bigger film companies.
The story of your film is really ideally placed to explore these contradictions that you mention between tradition and modernity, eastern and western culture, duty and desire, these very universal issues. I assume that although these issues are universal they’re also what make the film very personal to you…?
Well my background is that I was born in Kenya. I came to live in England when I was very young. My parents were working-class immigrants: my mother worked in a sweat shop for many years and my father was a clerical officer doing admin work. They worked all hours to make sure that we got an education that would give us choices in our lives. My brothers are both shopkeepers. They work 24/7: one has a newsagent and one has a DIY store. So that’s my class and immigrant background. I’m very much part of that Indian Diaspora and it necessarily gives me a perspective about Otherness. When we first came to this country ‘paki’-bashing was at its height. Enoch Powell had made his speech about rivers of blood and my introduction to racism was in the school playground. You know, skinhead girls wanting to beat up ‘paki’s. So while I think that things have changed and for the better at the same time I think that it’s inevitable that my personal experience is going to come into play. What I wanted to do with the Shah family in Nina’s Heavenly Delights was to show that they were very integrated into Glasgow society. They’re part of this Glasgow neighbourhood where Auntie Mamie, who’s the florist, a white working class Glaswegian woman, is very much a part of the family. Indian families are very open and warm and in my own family I remember that even when we didn’t have a lot of food in the house my mother would always keep the house open and she would always find that little bit extra to feed people. The openness of the Shah family to their neighbourhood comes through in the way that Mamie and Lisa can just come and go from the house and the way in which they’re treated in the home. I think that’s the cultural nuance of Indian families that I wanted to capture. Then there’s Korma Radio, a local radio station in the film. The sign of Asian presence in Britain is now so deep that we are very much enshrined in the everyday culture of society. This is not something that was there when I was growing up.
And the food preparation becomes a metaphor for the openness of the family and the way in which the family brings people together in a way redolent of films like Eat, Drink, Man, Woman and Big Night…
Well, those are the two films that I would totally name check as my two references and also obviously Priscilla Queen of the Desert for my drag queen Bobbi [Nina’s friend in the film]!
Didn’t Art Malik describe the film as ‘My Beautiful Curry House’?
When he first read the script he said ‘well, this is ‘My Beautiful Restaurant.’ My Beautiful Launderette is still one of my favourite British-Asian films and when I met Stephen Frears a couple of years ago I said to him, ‘it’s the best British-Asian film that’s ever been made’ and he said, ‘By a White Imperialist Male!’
It would be interesting to hear more about your documentary background. What prompted you to move into documentary? Was it because it was easier or because you felt that you would be able to address certain issues in a more serious and rigorous way than in fiction? If so what prompted you to move into fiction?
My initial motivation for making films was very much about trying to make documentaries that helped to challenge and change perceptions of ethnic minorities, of Asian people, of women, of lesbian and gay people. I got into documentaries because I felt that for me at that particular time documentary was a really powerful tool for trying to tell the stories that I wanted to tell. I wanted to make these stories visible. At that time in the mid-late 80s there was very little. I was a youth and community worker, I was an academic and I got my break with Channel Four television as a researcher on documentaries and just got completely hooked. As soon as the whole process of making films and visual media was actually demystified by actually being involved in it, it became something that it was possible for me to do. It wasn’t only for people with a particular specialist training or something that only white men did. So I loved making documentaries and I still do and I will always make documentaries. However the political, cultural and financial climate became very difficult for the kind of documentaries that I wanted to make because most of my documentaries were very much authored pieces. They weren’t jobbing documentaries. They were ideas and stories that I’d generated and got the funding for and that completely dried up when reality TV hit the screens. There was no room for the documentaries that I wanted to make.
So I really had to think about alternative ways to tell stories. I did want to explore less didactic and more dramatic ways of telling stories and fiction was something that always appealed to me. Even with my documentaries I used to have drama and dance within them as part of documentary story telling so I thought well ‘ok, this is something that I’m going to train myself to do.’ I’ve never been to film school. I’ve learned just by doing things and asking a lot of questions. So I put myself through an acting course for three months and learned what actors go through. I took drama courses, short courses, weekend courses and then just started making short dramas, went and did a stint on the BBC series Doctors, which was really very useful training, all moving towards making my first feature film. In a way I feel that the last six years have been difficult in terms of funding but have also really enabled me to learn more about directing drama.
So you kept going. There were never any points when you felt like giving up…?
Well let’s put it this way, I definitely have a hit list! Of course there were times when I thought ‘My God, why has it got to be as difficult as this? It shouldn’t have to be’ when I knew and could see that there were other directors who had done so much less than me, had so much less experience, who were getting commissions and making their films. But I’ve had a group of people and a partner who’ve been incredibly supportive and have kept their faith in me. I felt that if I didn’t do this I would never make another film.
And I believe the film had a very tight turnaround in the end?
Yes. I planned to make it for £3 million and then made it for a third of that and shot the film in five weeks on HD. You can see that it doesn’t look low-budget at all. I really didn’t want it to look low-budget with shaky handheld camerawork and all of that because it wasn’t a social realist film.
Given your documentary background it’s interesting that you’ve gone in absolutely the other direction and made a very expressionistic film…
I wanted that very magical quality to it. I wanted to do Amelie in Glasgow! That film had a huge budget but I managed to bring in some magical aspects to the storytelling. It was a crucial part of the story for me and that aesthetic was a crucial part of the world and its emotions. I’m not against socially realist storytelling at all. I think that there have been some really powerful films like that. I may do that in my next film but at the same time for me cinema has to be pleasurable. Having grown up on Bollywood films and also the directors of the French New Wave, Baz Luhrmann, Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Soderbergh – Out of Sight is a favourite and is really beautifully shot – I’m also interested in telling stories dramatically.
The way that you shoot Glasgow is quite romantic…
I think that Glasgow is a really beautiful city, I think that it’s very European in the architecture of the buildings and in the way the streets and parks are organised and when I first went there I was really struck by that. So I just wanted to celebrate Glasgow as a city. I didn’t want to create something unrealistic but rather I wanted to emphasise its beauty rather than the estates and the grittiness which also exists – there’s no denying it – but which I didn’t want to show because plenty of other films have shown that.
How did you find working with your actors? Was your acting experience useful?
Very useful. I teach actors now and I love it. It’s one of my favourite things actually. I did manage to get two weeks rehearsal time which really helped given that we had such a short turnaround on the film. It’s great because we had an ensemble cast of very experienced actors like Art Malik and then younger actors who haven’t had as much experience. This is Shelley Conn’s first lead role in a film. She’s almost in every frame and she had to work really hard at it. She really stepped up to the challenge, as did Ronny Jhutti who transformed himself into this incredible Bollywood drag queen figure who’s not in any way clichéd I don’t think. We really tried to avoid that. Then the mother is absolutely brilliant in the film. I think that her story is really interesting because again it’s not the stereotypical finger-wagging Asian mother. She’s dignified and elegant and has a life her own.
So what are your hopes for the film?
Well I think it’s a minor miracle that I got to make Nina’s Heavenly Delights so I’m just over the moon that it’s showing in over forty cinemas around the country and I really do hope that, given that the distributors did not have a really big P&A budget or anything and that we haven’t been able to do the masses of PR and campaigning that I would have liked on this film, that word of mouth gets out and that people go and see the film and see it in the first weekend because that will really help to get more publicity and for it to stay in cinemas. It is incredibly difficult for films like this that aren’t star led or director led to compete with other films on the same night so you hope that enough word of mouth gets out so that people will go along an support the film, mainly because they’re going to have a bloody good night out!
And will you make further fictional films?
Yes I have a couple of scripts that I’m working on. I hope to shoot my next one next year and not to wait for another six years!
Another romantic comedy?
No, it’s a coming of age road movie set in India!
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