I FOR INDIA a family's story told in 40 years of super8

In 1965 Yash Pal Suri left India for the UK. The first thing he did was buy two Super-8 cameras, one of which he sent home to his family India. For the next 40 years, the family exchanged 'cine-letters', as Suri shared his new life abroad, while his relatives told tale of weddings, festivals and village life. As time passed, and the planned return to India becomes increasingly remote, the joy and curiosity of the early exchanges gives way to the darker reality of alienation, racism, and a family's choices in belonging. I for India is a chronicle of immigration in 1960s Britain and beyond, seen through the eyes of one Asian family and their movie camera. Over four decades later, his collection of films and audio diaries accrued over this period constitutes an informal visual archive of resettlement and dislocation, hope, disillusionment and partings. It also shows the process by which, sometimes unintentionally, a house can become a home. Assembled by his daughter Sandhya Suri who adds footage of her own, interspersing this with clips of 1960s BBC programmes for Asian viewers that now beggar belief (‘This is a switch on a wall, a switch’) as well as reports from programmes on immigration with titles such as ‘The Dark Million’, this is a deeply personal family film that, with questions of ‘citizenship’ and suchlike high on the political agenda, has wide contemporary relevance.