IF YOU HAD turned up a little early to the
world premiere of Blinded By The Light at
Sundance Festival in Utah, and made your way
towards the auditorium through the nearby car
park, you might have seen something surprising:
the director, Gurinder Chadha, dancing with the
film’s star, Viveik Kalra, and co-writers Paul
Mayeda Berges and Sarfraz Manzoor, to Bruce
Springsteen’s ‘Hungry Heart’, as it blasted
through a car stereo.
“Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack...”
For Chadha, it was certainly one way to
triumph over the nerves that naturally come
when you watch your film with an audience for
the first time. And by the time the film — based
on Manzoor’s book, Greetings From Bury Park,
about coming of age in 1980s Luton with a little
help from Springsteen — had finished, the crowd
were on their feet and a bidding war was erupting
among American distributors. What happened
later that evening is what Chadha, in a studio in
London’s Kentish Town on a rainy June day, calls
“the sort of thing that independent filmmakers
dream of ”, with a smile. She was on her feet once
more, on the dancefloor at the Blinded By The
Light afterparty, when she received a phone call
to say that New Line were offering $15 million
for the film. They’d actually only made it an hour
into the film before sending a message to say that
they wanted to buy it. “If you’re not making a
studio film, you worry if you’re going to get
distribution, full stop,” says Chadha. “Never
mind getting a good price for it.”
Making this even more incredible is that,
in spite of her mounting pile of accolades —
including an OBE for service to British film
— Gurinder Chadha continues to be something
of an outsider in her field.
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, but raised in Southall
by Sikh parents during the 1980s, the filmmaker
never dreamt of picking up a camera, let alone
making several commercially successful films.
London then was a difficult place for
immigrant communities, with Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher’s austere immigration
stance and the National Front on the rise. As a
British-Asian girl, Chadha’s prospects were, in the
words of her career advisor, probably limited to
secretarial school — her best shot at making
something of herself, she was told. “I definitely
never planned on being a director when I was
younger,” she says. “People that looked like me
weren’t directors. We were seen as stereotypes.
I just didn’t think that the option was open to me.”
CHADHA’S EXPERIENCE AS a marginalised
teenager in London can be seen reflected in
the story of Javed, the aspiring writer and
frustrated son of traditional Pakistani parents
in Blinded By The Light.
“I recently hosted a screening for family and
friends, some of whom brought their kids along,”
Chadha remembers. “After the film finished, the
kids were asking their parents: ‘Oh my God, was
it really that bad?’ We forget how ugly it was —
there were no jobs, there was no future for
young people. There was unemployment, and
there was racism.”
Chadha says she owes much of her tenacity to
her parents, but as a British-Asian woman, it was
racism that inspired her ambition, and that
spurred her on to become a news reporter initially.
“Racism is the whole reason why I trained
to be a journalist when I was younger,” she says.
“I thought that was how to change the way that
people saw us. I felt that my purpose was to take
people that looked like my family and me and
put them in the centre of the frame instead of on
the edge of the TV screen. That’s what I’ve done,
and what I’m still doing.”
After working in broadcast journalism,
Chadha moved into documentary filmmaking,
starting with 1989’s I’m British But..., which
examined young British-born Asians via the
bhangra music scene for Channel 4 and the BFI.
Then came 1992’s Acting Our Age, in which she
took to the streets of Southall to speak with
Asian elders about their experiences of Britain.
It’s this work and her relationship with
Channel 4 Films that led to Chadha’s feature
debut — and the first feature film by an Asian
woman in Britain — intergenerational British-
Asian comedy Bhaji On The Beach, in 1993.
It wasn’t just Chadha’s heritage that
made the film groundbreaking, but its depiction
of women in the British-Asian community
— stories about domestic violence and
unwanted pregnancies, that hadn’t been
seen on screen before.
But despite Bhaji On The Beach’s four-month
stint in cinemas and a BAFTA nomination for
Chadha, the director still found she wasn’t
recognised or respected by some of her peers.
“Films about women are not seen as skilled
or serious,” she shrugs. “Films about tortured
men are what men look for, and they are
ultimately the guardians of what is considered
to be important cinema. I think this is why
certain people don’t take me as seriously.”
The situation only worsened with her next
project: Rich Deceiver, a two-part 1995 BBC
drama. “It roped in something like 13 million
viewers at the time,” Chadha remembers.
“But when I was making it I was treated so
badly by the camera department. They were
absolute chauvinist pigs.”
Chadha had proven her capabilities as
a filmmaker and started the project with
a clear vision for how the show should look
and feel; something that was rejected by the
department of older men.Blinding scenes, from top:
Eliza (Nell Williams), Javed (Viveik Kalra) and Roops
(Aaron Phagura) are born to run; Javed and Roops hit
the rock bar; Javed and the ever-trusty ’80s NME;
Boss evangelist Roops; Chadha guides Kalra.❯ GROOMING: AMANDA GROSSMAN AT THE WALL GROUP. ADDITIONAL IMAGERY: ALAMY, BBC, SHUTTERSTOCK