PUSHER/UK INDIANS BREAK OUT

Many Bollywood films are changing style to suit Western audiences. But here is an Indian film – made in Britian - that breaks the mold entirely.

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Assad Raja - who wrote, directed and stars in the film - is a man with a mission to reshape the nature of Indian filmmaking, complete with very realistic characters and brutal violence, as well as the hand held, documentary ‘cinema-verite’ style camera work, which has never been seen in a mainstream Indian film..

And, at the same time, he wants to give himself and his fellow Indians in the UK a chance to escape the banal, stereotypical roles that they are usually offered.

Raja says: "I very much wanted to make an Indian film in a crazy, gritty style as nothing like this has been done in Indian or so called Bollywood cinema ever before."

Although he is obviously well versed in traditional Bollywood films, he clearly have a European mind set, with a love of French films, starting with Godard’s About de Souffle – and, more recently, German cinema a la Fassbinder.

He is also a fan of Japanese films, so it is easy to see how he went for the fast and hard-edged pace of Pusher.

The unconventional plot: A low level London drug dealer gets mixed up with some seriously dangerous people when he agrees to buy from a new supplier in order to pull the biggest score of his life.

Throw in a few girlfriend problems and a best mate who might just be a police informer times get tough.

Surprisingly, one of his biggest challenges was finding British Indian actors to play the juicey roles he was offering them for a change, because many of them did not speak Hindi, as the script required.

For one character, he was so desperate that he considered blacking up a white actor, so it seems the revolution in British Indian films will not be over just yet.

Posted August 1, 2008.