Shelley Conn, Veena Sood and Laura Fraser in Nina's Heavenly Delights
The words “lesbian drama” tend to conjure images of gritty social realism, teenage angst or – if you’re a fan of The L Word – an awful lot of sex. Equally, mention “Scottish Asian comedy drama” and thoughts are likely to turn to culture-clash offerings which find humour in conflict.
It’s refreshing then that director Pratibha Parmar has aimed for something a little bit different in her debut feature Nina’s Heavenly Delights. She describes it as a “passion project” and it is, in more ways than one.
“I had worked over the years on some very hard-hitting, political and cultural-issue based documentaries” says Pratibha.
“And I thought when I do a drama I want to be able to explore a different form of storytelling and different kind of genre. I wanted to have fun, basically.
“People say, ‘Okay, it’s a Scottish, Asian, lesbian, love story’ immediately all those labels make people think it must be a kind of angsty coming out story. That was the last kind of thing I wanted to do. I wanted to do a film where falling in love with somebody is just part and parcel of what happens to you if you are open to meeting different kinds of people and having an open heart.”
This passion for love permeates the film, which by avoiding the usual sort of remonstrations regarding sex and race, manages paradoxically to be subversive and conventional simultaneously.
The director – a lesbian herself, who admits that aspects of the film are semi-autobiographical - was keen to fly under the radar to a certain extent.
“I thought I want to tell a love story, I want to make a film about Indian food and an Indian family and about surprising an unexpected love.
“I wanted to come at this subject in an unpredictable way. Lesbian relationships are still seen as subversive.
“Much though people like to believe they are part of the norm now, with civil partnerships, they’re not. Depending on where you are culturally and what generation you are, people are going to have different sorts of responses to the film.”
And Pratibha was anxious to steer away from L Word territory to focus instead on the emotional aspects of love.
“It’s a family-friendly lesbian film,” she insists, borne out by the film’s PG rating – a far cry from the 15 certificate meted out to the similarly themed My Beautiful Laundrette 21 years ago.
Pratibha adds: “We see so much down and dirty sex on the screen – mostly heterosexual but also the L Word lesbian TV series – when every two minutes there are women getting down and dirty and, actually it interrupts the story telling.
“I wasn’t particularly interested in using up screentime on making it black and white and not letting the audiences use their imagination.”
She is also hopeful it will help to change attitudes.
“For me it’s really important to push the boundaries in that way, in creating different kinds of different cinematic possibilities.
“You imagine a reality that might feel a little bit far-fetched or may feel like a bit of a fantasy but actually you show it and some Asian families will go to see that film and say ‘actually, that’s okay if my son is in love with a white girl and wants to marry a white girl because other families are doing it’ - ie the family in the film because there is that kind of conflation between fiction and reality so often in our culture since we live in such a visual culture.”
Despite its small budget of around £1million, there is plenty of imagination on display, including aspects of magic realism – “I wanted to do more, really” – softening its edges. But despite the film’s gentle approach to lesbianism it has been a fight to get it from script to screen.
“I wrote the story seven years ago. I was determined to make this film for so many different reasons. Partly because it is a passion project and I wanted to tell the story and tell it on the cinema screen as a feature film.
“The first disastrous thing that happened along the years when we were looking for financing was we lost 40 per cent of our funding overnight when Black Tuesday happened in the film industry in 2003. So then we lost everything else because it was a domino effect. Then I lost my producer Scott Meek who went away to Sydney, Australia.
“So I had to have new producers and start from scratch. It was made for around £1million and it doesn’t look it.
“One of the other things for me was that quite a lot of distributors and financiers would literally – though some were more sophisticated than others – say, ‘there’s no market for films with a lesbian theme. And not only have you got a lesbian film, they are also Scottish and Asian.’ And so, by implication, they were saying this is such a marginal story with no relevance for anyone else that people would not want to go and see it.
“I was determined to show that that’s just rubbish.”
And Pratibha shoots down suggestions that things have become easier for Asian-themed stories with the rise of Bollywood films and the upsurge of TV shows such as The Kumars At No.42 and Meet The Magoons.
“I think it’s shifting but the shift is so miniscule and too slow.
“People say ‘We just had Bend it like Beckham a couple of years ago so we don’t need another Asian film’. It’s like a bus, we’re only allowed to come along every now and then.”
Pratibha is now embarking on “a one woman PR campaign” for the film, which will see her globetrotting to festivals across the globe. But despite the long slog to get the film to the screen, it hasn’t put her off.
“I have got a couple of other feature films I’m developing. I’m determined that the next one is not going take as long as this one.”
Her determination to make a love story with a lesbian twist pays off when Nina’s Heavenly Delights makes its grand entrance at cinemas up and down the country on September 29.
Enter our competition to win Nina's Heavenly Delights CD soundtracks and snazzy aprons here.
Read our review here.
