This beautiful, quietly nostalgic film consisting of family home movies and photos belies the raw pain of a life of suppression and self-denial. There is no dialog, but the narration is mournful in recounting the life of a young woman from India who married someone they had only known for seven hours prior to the ceremony.
Her life as it unwinds from there is summed up as one of increasingly suffocating attempts at “fitting in” to the London suburbs where she and her young family reside. However, the triumph of her breaking free of the expectations of her family and the society she tried so hard to assimilate into and the legacy of agency she imparts to her daughters is movingly depicted at the film’s end.
Beautifully affirming in its message, Brown Brit makes a case for breaking the cycle of generational trauma caused by bigotry and shame inflicted on the immigrants making a new life for themselves in another country. This is true not just for the United Kingdom, as is shown in this film, but anywhere those who are seeking a better way for themselves and their children find themselves.
It is clear that there are strong bonds of love between the woman who is the focus of this film and her daughters, but the lack of any reference to the father of the family, not even showing his face in any of the family footage, is a silently damning indictment of a patriarchal society that expects women to be pigeon-holed in specific gender roles. All of this is conveyed in under twelve minutes of screen time, which is simply remarkable. Brown Brit is a lovely heartfelt tribute to a mother who, as the film says… “was raised to always follow the rules… and taught [her daughters] to break them.”