Object of the week: Behind-the-scenes shots from the making of the first British Asian feature film

In many ways, these photographs look entirely typical of behind-the-scenes images from a low-budget 1970s production: all that flared denim, abundant facial hair, and atmosphere of earnest concentration. 

However, they capture something much more significant than just another film being made; they offer a record of history in the making – the film we see being made in these photographs is A Private Enterprise (1974), generally regarded as the first British Asian film. Directed by Peter K. Smith, its screenplay was a collaboration between Smith and writer and commentator Dilip Hiro (interviewed by Bernard Braden in 1968).

The film’s subject was the experience of Shiv, a young engineering graduate from the Indian subcontinent – as Hiro had been – trying to make his way in 1970s Birmingham. Shiv (played by Salmaan Peerzada, credited here as Salmaan Peer) is embroiled in the trade union politics of his factory workplace, where he works alongside flatmate Ashok (Marc Zuber). But he has his entrepreneurial heart set on owning his own business, the ‘private enterprise’ of the title: a workshop manufacturing Indian trinkets, including a decorated elephant Shiv presents in a demo to two giggling, disinterested girls.

Like Benjamin in the parallel coming-of-age tale The Graduate (1967), Shiv is a young man unsure of his place in the world. He feels out of place in a range of situations, from dance lessons to white middle-class house parties, union gatherings to awkward dates – all sensitively portrayed through Smith’s direction. 

But Shiv also has to contend with the bigger stumbling block of his adopted country’s racism, laid bare in the film’s gently heartrending final scene where his smiling interaction with a baby on a train is prevented by the mother turning her child away from him.

An earlier encounter on a train with student Penny (Diana Quick) had promised a moment of connection. But their uneasily-conducted fledgling romance comes to nothing, and Shiv comes to realise he is little more to Penny than a daringly radical bauble. 

Just as shallow is nouveau riche Chandra (Shukla Bhattercharjee), a young woman who Shiv’s uncle Ramji (Ramon Sinha) thinks would be an excellent match for his nephew, due to her father’s business clout, but whose snobbish materialism – feigning ignorance of Birmingham’s Bull Ring centre because she does her shopping in Paris – Shiv finds deeply off-putting.

Made on a micro-budget through the auspices of the BFI Production Board, headed at the time by Mamoun Hassan, A Private Enterprise very much lived up to Hassan’s later statement that British cinema “should be real; it should be rooted in what is happening.” It led the way in representing British-Asian experience on screen, forging an important pathway in British filmmaking.

Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.