Migration and Belonging (All ages)

A series of short films and discussion, part of the Representation of South Asian Women in Scottish Culture showcase.

Across the Waters (Sana Bilgrami, Documentary, 2004)

Four months pregnant, in 1955, a young woman left her village in Pakistan with her new husband and travelled to the remote and beautiful Outer Hebrides. Fifty years later, her granddaughter, one of a few third-generation Asians in her community, is getting ready to sail from the shores of the island. Three generations of Pakistani women and an old Gaelic islander tell us a story of migration, exile and belonging in a poetic, reflective journey across two cultures.

Ethnoresidue (Jasleen Kaur, Documentary, 2020)

Ethnoresidue is an experimental documentary film that weaves textual and visual threads around an existing conversation with Kaur’s maternal grandmother that formed part of her book Be Like Teflon, 2019. Grounding itself in Pollockshields, Glasgow, a site of family and the city’s South Asian community, Kaur expands on the complexities and intimacies of identity, belonging, reckoning with histories and their entanglement in colonial structures that persist.

Meet Me by the Water (Raisah Ahmed, Drama, 2016)

In a small Scottish fishing town a young Asian woman must decide whether to leave home and family for a new life in South America.

Points of Departure (Alia Syed, Experimental, 2014)

Points of Departure uses archive footage of a collective past and combines it with personal recollections to fracture the normative culturally dominant view of Glasgow’s cityscapes and re-insert a Scottish Asian presence.