Sikh Film Festival Highlights the Discontent of the Diaspora

October 24, 2005

Source: The Telegraph

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1051024/asp/calcutta/story_5386586.asp

On October 24, 2005 The Telegraph reported, "The Spinning Wheel Film Festival, which concluded in Toronto last week, opened with Shonali Bose and Bedabrata Bain’s Amu, this year’s National Award winner for Best English Language Feature Film. Amu, a young NRI, is on a visit to India to retrace her roots and coincidentally stumbles upon the horrors perpetrated upon the Sikhs during the riots following Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984... The festival purportedly seeks to examine the crisis of identity amongst the Sikh diaspora, but it reflects the complex pulls and tugs of the Indian mosaic. Audience reaction suggested a sense of the issues at stake... The choice of short films and features at Spinning Wheel ranged from the mediocre to the memorable. Ben Rekhi’s Waterborne was a masterpiece on how human beings react when denied something they take for granted in their everyday lives: water, for instance... Some of the better documentaries in the festival included Ali Kazimi’s Runaway Grooms, Richie Mehta’s Amal, Valerie Kaur’s Divided We Fall, and Hardeep Singh Kohli/Robert Sproul-Cran’s incisive exploration of ‘identity’ in multicultural UK, In Search of the Tartan Turban."