The London Asian Film Festival was founded in 1999 by Dr. Pushpinder Chowdry and Harvinder Nath. The event is run by Tongues on Fire, a non-profit organization that strives to promote South Asian culture and to provide a platform for independent film and arts with a link to the South Asian region. The film festival is just one of the organization’s many projects.
The UK Asian Film Festival aims to showcase the work of emerging talents, provide networking opportunities and wider learning opportunities for filmmakers, and entertain and educate the audience. The festival’s philosophy is to emphasize the fact that entertainment is inseparable from important social and political messages.
The festival program focuses on films that tackle challenging issues of the modern society and celebrate the vibrancy and many dimensions of South Asian culture. The UK Asian Film Festival features mainly independent and arthouse films but more popular and mainstream movies are screened as well.
The festival is open to short, feature and documentary films that are linked to both South Asia and the current theme of the festival. For example, the 2015 theme was Women in Cinema. The films must be in English or have English subtitles.
Alongside film screenings, the program of the UK Asian Film Festival includes workshops and masterclasses, panel discussions, lectures, seminars, interviews, live performances, visual art exhibitions, and more. One of the festival’s main highlights is an annual short film competition designed to celebrate and award great films and filmmakers from South Asia.
Industry guests who’ve attended the UK Asian Film Festival include Mira Nair, Gurinder Chadha, Aparna Sen, Meera Syal, Nandita Das, Shabana Azmi, Kiron Kher, Madhur Jaffrey, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Jaya Bachchan, Farah Khan, and other notable filmmakers and actors.
Photo: tonguesonfire.com
