Kenny Glenaan's movie "Yasmin", from 2004, deals with the tensions between the Muslimic and the non-Muslimic community in Great Britain after September 11th 2001. The young Pakistani woman Yasmin tries to lead a life of two identities: On the one hand living as a Muslim woman in a bogus marriage with a Pakistani peasant, who is a stranger to her, on the other hand going to work as a fashionable self-confident modern English woman flirting with her colleague and not caring about religion or politics. This all changes after September 11th .when she becomes the target of racist jokes at work and has to experience that her family is falling apart. Her husband is arrested as a terror suspect and her brother wants to become a jihad warrior. Yasmin is standing between two frontiers trying to find her own identity. I can recommend the film because it opened my eyes towards the problem of being a Muslim after 9/11 in a non-Muslim society. The idea of having professional actors mixed with non-professionals works fantastically. The characters are vivid, complex and believable. Glenaan manages to put many different people into one family who all represent different groups of Muslim people without letting them look like stereotypes. So many different views, opinions, educations etc. brought together in a few characters make the movie a pleasure to watch. Kenny Glenaan shows that there are two worlds within British cities which cannot be combined without blaming one of the groups. It is a movie that shows how things are getting people to think about racism and prejudice in society after 9/11. I think Yasmin is a must-see concerning the multicultural society after 9/11 not only in Britain.
Review of Yasmin
