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 i for india interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Home sweet home. For many kids growing up, their dad getting out the home-movie camera is up there with his earnest disco dancing on the embarrassment scale. For Sandhya Suri, a near 40-year archive of Super 8 footage, shot by her father Yash since his 1965 arrival in the UK from India, provides the backbone for her thought-provoking, intensely moving documentary, I For India. Suri's material also comprised candid audio reels documenting her family's new life in a strange land – Darlington – for the relatives back home (Yash sent one set of equipment there too, for two-way audio-visual communication). "The audio reels contained a lot of the darker, more painful commentaries that my father had recorded," relates Suri, "which gave me a lot of understanding and empathy for my parents' struggle. It's like having a 40-year observational documentary, so I absolutely knew I had to make it into something."  No mere exercise in nostalgia, Suri, a National Film & Television School graduate, brilliantly weaves together her family's fascinating archives – first experience of English snowfall, an elaborate Indian wedding – with then-contemporary / now cringeworthy BBC programmes on Asian immigration (like The Dark Million), as well as her own modern footage, documenting and interviewing her parents and sisters for their thoughts on what constitutes history and home. The answers – and the process itself – were rarely straightforward. "The minute you leave your home, a possibility comes into existence that you might not go back," confirms Suri. "And every day longer that you stay out of your home, that possibility gets stronger." Indeed the family's belated attempt to resettle in India, when she was six years old, was highly problematic; her sister's later decision to forge her own independent adult life brings events to an ironic, heart-rending conclusion.  Public response to a film is one thing, family reaction is another, and, inevitably, a screening held in India was an emotional event: "It was like a Bollywood movie," Suri remembers. "It was so dramatic. Everybody was crying, I was crying – and filming. The camera [work] was not very steady." But what of the split between being objective filmmaker and integrated family member? "It definitely put a distance there," Suri admits, "but at the same time going through and editing these archives about [my parents'] long struggle in England to build our lives, brought me so much closer to them as well. It was all a matter of trust."
Leigh Singer
I For India, on selected release 03 August 07.
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