contaminant media

Split screen                         Peter Kosminsky                              Telegraph 9th April 2009

On the set of Britz: Peter Kosminsky (right) with Riz Ahmed

In the aftermath of the July 2005 Tube and bus bombings in London, the director Peter Kosminsky set out to make two films that examine the wildly differing views of a British Muslim brother and sister – a project that was to raise profound questions of his own

Thursday, 12.40pm on July 21, 2005. Deep underground, on a Victoria Line train approaching Warren Street station, a man named Yassin Hassan Omar reaches into his rucksack, closes a switch. The backpack explodes, but not with the force intended. The carriage fills with the smell of burning rubber. As the train enters Warren Street, people clamber over each other to reach the exit. Omar cries out. He seems shocked and disorientated, unable to understand why he is still alive. Passengers tackle him but he breaks away, fleeing into the dark.

Eighty feet up and 100 yards south, I was sitting with colleagues at a street cafe discussing how to follow our film about the suicide of Dr David Kelly – transmitted on Channel 4 as The Government Inspector just a few weeks before. Ambulances and fire engines screamed north up Tottenham Court Road as we sipped our frothy coffees. Barely a fortnight before, 52 had died in similarly unheralded attacks on the transport network of our city. As we watched anxious young policemen searching passing Asians and taping off London’s northern thoroughfare, it felt as if we were under siege.

In the days that followed, and as the identities of those responsible for the July deaths emerged, it became increasingly clear that there really was only one possible subject for our next film. How was it that a group of second-generation British Muslims, born here, raised here, educated in British schools, steeped in British culture, could have become so angry, feel themselves so powerless and disenfranchised, that they would strap explosives to their bodies and set out to kill and maim their fellow British citizens? We abandoned our other storylines and turned our attention to making a drama that might help answer that question. Britz, two films about how a fictional Bradford family react to being Muslim in Britain today, was the result.

I myself am a second-generation Briton, at least on my mother’s side. She was what would now be called an asylum-seeker, fleeing certain death in Vienna, arriving alone at Victoria station with a label tied around her neck. I only exist because Britain gave her sanctuary. All my life I’ve felt the consequential battle within me. On the one hand, the desire to be accepted – to obscure (if I’m honest, to conceal) my foreignness and out-British the Brits. To dress like them, act like them, react like them, to dig into their society and succeed according to their rules. On the other hand, the competing desire to be true to who I really am, to deny Britishness, on occasion to pour scorn on its arrogance and small-mindedness and, to be faithful, culturally and intellectually, to my immigrant forebears, who, when you get right down to it, weren’t very British at all.

This confusion, this sense of muddled identity, was my starting point in trying to write about what it might feel to be a young, second-generation Asian Muslim growing up in Britain today.

When I was a child, I used to imagine what it would be like to have a younger sister. Worryingly, I think this may have been little more than the desire to have an adoring younger sibling whom I could guide and protect. Over the years, this sister became more rather than less real to me. In my imagination she was the better part of me, unfettered by doubt, with the courage of her convictions, the precocious child who never lied and was pretty tough on those (such as her inadequate older brother) who did. My imaginary sister reached her apogee in the stories I told my daughters to help them get to sleep at night. Predictably, the gentle and humane Tilly (that was her name) proved popular with my children and, as bedtime approached, I was often found struggling to think up new adventures for her. When imagination failed, I drew on my own experiences, though, as ever, Tilly behaved with more integrity than I could ever have mustered.

So it was that when, just over two years ago, I was wrestling with how to dramatise the battle for allegiance in the mind of a second-generation immigrant, I hit upon the idea of splitting the opposing sides of my own internal debate into two parts: a brother and a sister. To the brother I would give my desire to integrate, to be British. To his sister I would give my rebelliousness, my desire to overturn the applecart. They would be emotionally close but have wildly differing views on Britain, her politics and the role of a second-generation Muslim in her midst. They would both be living secret lives and they would confront each other at the climax.

As a writer and director with a track record of dramatising truth, the prospect of writing two entirely fictional films without that prop was rather intimidating. I needed to commission some research, if only to help me create a world of which, at least at the outset, I knew so little. Muslim researchers and friends began an extensive series of interviews, in London, Leeds and Bradford, designed to cast light on the mindset of second-generation British Muslims. Meanwhile, my long-time research collaborator, Rosanne Flynn, began looking somewhere very different – at the Security Service, MI5.

Following the July bombings, it became known that MI5 was recruiting British-born Muslims. Such an option, I thought, might be attractive to a young man determined to prove his loyalty, to dig his way into the very heart of the British establishment. But the more Rosanne researched, the clearer it became that any such recruit would face a terrible dilemma. Most if not all of those being targeted for surveillance by MI5 are Muslim. Coming from Bradford, Sohail Wahid (the brother in my drama, played by Riz Ahmed) would rapidly find himself spying on his own friends, even his extended family. For a young man struggling with his identity, such a mission might test his loyalty, his determination to be British, to breaking point.

If digging into the secretive world of MI5 was difficult, the task faced by our Muslim researchers was even harder. Sohail’s younger sister, Nasima (played by Manjinder Virk), was to be a medical student in our drama. But political activism, born of a smouldering resentment against British foreign policy and the raft of newly enacted anti-terror legislation, would eventually lead her to militancy.

We needed to understand the thought process behind the decision to go overseas and train. And we needed to discover, in some detail, what goes on in those training centres. As you might imagine, people were not keen to discuss these matters, especially in the aftermath of the July bombings. Our research team were surprisingly tenacious but some of the detail had to be taken from open sources.

I’ve always been interested in the way point of view affects perception. Watch a stilted exchange between a man and his mistress through a half-open door and you might conclude that the relationship is over. Watch the same conversation through the window, from where you can see that the man’s wife is also present in the room, and you will come to a very different conclusion. Your perception depends on your point of view. I decided to build the two parts of Britz round this idea.

The first film tells the story of the events leading up to the sixth anniversary of 9/11 from the point of view of Sohail Wahid. His sister Nasima is little more than an incidental character in his drama, which focuses on his induction into the International Counter-Terrorism Department of MI5. The second film goes back in time to the same inciting event, their younger brother Rafiq returning from school with a bloody nose, but sees all subsequent events from Nasima’s point of view. Exchanges between brother and sister that seemed casual or unimportant in film one develop a critical importance when seen from Nasima’s perspective in film two. On two occasions, Sohail might have intervened to change the course of his sister’s life. But it is only by revisiting these events from Nasima’s point of view that we understand the magnitude of the opportunity lost.

The shoot was one of the toughest but also one of the most rewarding that I’ve experienced in 27 years behind the camera. There are memories that will remain with me for as long as I draw breath. During a recce of the central mosque in Leeds, we were shown a room where bodies are washed prior to burial. The washing process, undertaken in accord with Koranic teaching, is carried out by the same-sex relatives and friends of the deceased and has rarely, if ever, been filmed. The event as described seemed likely to have such a powerful impact on a young woman like Nasima that I rushed back to my hotel room and wrote it into the script. The elders at the Mosque in Leeds could not have been more helpful, guiding us through the process and making sure that the burial materials we used were authentic. We planned the scene carefully, rehearsing the correct way to wash and wrap the body in our hotel room the night before. But nothing could have prepared me for the emotional power of shooting that sequence. Standing quietly watching the event play out in real time, with as unintrusive a camera as I could contrive was one of the most emotional experiences I have had on a film set. Our supporting cast for that scene had all had direct experience of the event we were recreating – the preparation for burial of their own dead relatives and friends. For some, the emotion was still very raw and no help was required from the make-up department to conjure the tears. In fact, I think it’s true to say that most of us were in tears – members of my world-weary crew, as well as their lachrymose director.

And then there was the scene, shot in bitter mid-winter in London but simulating 45 degree heat in Rawalpindi, where our young leading actress lowers a bomb over her head for the first time. The vulnerability of her bare flesh juxtaposed with that grizzly device had a power I could not have predicted. The expression on her face – trying not to shiver from the cold, trying not to cry from the wretched emotion of the moment, is with me now as I write this piece.

Of course, you could say that the entire endeavour is wrong-headed. What comfort can it possibly afford the friends and relatives of those who died on that summer day in 2005 to see someone go through a similar process of radicalisation? Would it not be better just to condemn it unequivocally, as the act of madmen, and then have the good grace to shut up?

Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s that easy. I don’t think we do any service to the survivors of that carnage to suggest that the perpetrators were insane or irredeemably evil – motivated by nothing more than religious fanaticism and a desire to spend eternity in a virginal embrace. We have to confront the fact that these were not overseas mercenaries, visiting soldiers of the global jihad, they were British – born here, educated here, iPod-owning, Man U-supporting, people like us. Unless we can understand how they came to be so angry, so disillusioned with our democracy with all its famed checks and balances, so cornered and desperate that they would blow themselves apart for their cause, how can we ever hope to combat it? How can we ever hope to stop such a despicable event occurring again?

Others might say it’s really not my problem. I didn’t pass these new repressive laws; I don’t support the foreign policy of the British Government. I’m innocent. Are we? Are we innocent? I know the impact the anti-terror laws are having on British Muslims, even if I choose to look away. I know how the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan and how uncritical support for Israel are seen by Muslims here and overseas but, like so many others, I do nothing; I look away. Can I, under these circumstances, claim to be truly innocent? Can you? Can we really, with honour, complain if we get caught up in the inevitable backlash – here on the streets of our green and sometimes pleasant land?

‘Britz’ is on Channel 4 on October 31 and November 1 2009