GOA: The 41st International Film Festival of India, 2010, which kick-started in Goa yesterday, saw West is West (2010) as its inaugural film. 

 

The film directed by Andy de Emmony is a sequel to the Popular East is East produced in 1999. The cast of the film includes Om Puri, Linda Bassett, Aqib Khan, Jimi Mistry, Ila Arun and Vijay Raaz. The film produced by Leslee Udwin, has music by Rob Lane and Shankar Ehsaan Loy.

 

Set in Manchester 1975, West is West is a story of the claustrophobic and dysfunctional, Khan family’s struggle for survival. Sajid, the youngest Khan, the runt of the litter, is deep in pubescent crisis under heavy assault both from his father’s tyrannical insistence on Pakistani tradition, and from the fierce bullies in the schoolyard. So, in a last, desperate attempt to ‘sort him out’, his father decides to pack him off to Mrs. Khan No 1 and family in the Punjab, the wife and daughters he had abandoned 35 years earlier. It is not long before Ella Khan (Mrs. Khan No 2) with a small entourage from Salford, England, swiftly follows to sort out the mess, past and present.