 Hanif Kureishi |
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Film/Video
REGIS DIALOGUE AND RETROSPECTIVE TALES OF THE CITY: HANIF KUREISHI'S ROUGH GUIDE TO LONDON SEPTEMBER 5-29, 2001 $6 ($4 WALKER MEMBERS) SCREENINGS $12 ($8 WALKER MEMBERS) REGIS DIALOGUE AUDITORIUM |
One of the most remarkable voices to emerge during the 1980s, Hanif Kureishi has composed a major body of work--including plays, screenplays, short stories, and novels--that challenges traditional British mores about class, race, and sexuality. The son of a Pakistani father and a British mother, Kureishi grew up in the suburbs of London before studying at King's College. After graduation, he began writing short plays and pornography. He gained major recognition with his first full-length play, The Mother Country, which won the 1980 Thames Television Playwright Award. In 1981, Kureishi became writer-in-residence at the Royal Court and authored the plays Outskirts, Tomorrow Today, and Borderlines. During the next few years, he also wrote Birds of Passage and an adaptation of Mother Courage.
From the beginning, Kureishi's work has emphasized charged issues in British culture, such as the stereotyping of Asian immigrants, racial intolerance, and the compromised position of mixed-race youths. Building on his theatrical success, Kureishi established an international reputation as a provocateur through his collaborations with film director Stephen Frears on the screenplays for My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. These films contain two of the most searing and memorable images of cultural revolt against Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's politics: an interracial, gay male kiss (in Laundrette) and scenes of London streets ablaze with race riots (in Laid). In the '90s, he pushed himself even further, making a foray into novel-writing with The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and The Black Album (1995) and into filmmaking with his directorial debut of London Kills Me (1991). Intimacy (2001), the latest film produced from Kureishi's writing, is boldly adapted from his novel of the same title and extends the themes of carnal relations, power struggles, and underrepresented subjects of London culture that are prevalent in much of his work. "My aim in life is to get as much filth and anarchy into the cinema as possible," Kureishi once said. He hit his target, and his aim remains true today.
For more information on Kureishi, go to his Web site at www.hanifkureishi.com.
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