![]() ![]() At first Guljit, a big football fan had envisioned it as a story of a girl who was really into football and goes to play with a football team in Ireland before her father dies, and so she has to come home. It had been in the works for five years before it got made as Gurinder, Paul Mayeda Berges, and Guljit Bindra worked on finalising the script. It stayed at number one in the UK for 13 weeks, and in the US went to number seven, competing with blockbuster Hollywood films with budgets way beyond the £3.7m it took to bring this canonical masterpiece to life.īut Bend It Like Beckham almost didn’t happen. It was a critical and commercial juggernaut. ![]() On this day, 20 years ago, Bend It Like Beckham made those third culture British kids feel less alone.įresh from the mind of trailblazing director Gurinder Chadha, OBE – who was the first-ever British-Asian woman to direct a full-length feature film with her 1993 Bhaji on the Beach – the hilarious film told the story of a young Punjabi girl name Jesminder “Jess” Bhamra in Hounslow, west London, who wanted to play football. But it was also a difficult time, not only because people were wearing ‘gypsy’ skirts over flared jeans, but the reverb of 9/11 was being felt around the world, and racism towards brown people was even palpable to children who were being treated differently in the playground, afraid to openly celebrate their culture. Spring has just arrived and you’re perfecting Shakira’s Whenever, Wherever choreo in front of The Hits TV channel on Saturdays, in between playing snake on your mum’s phone, making dens in the living room, and watching Tracy Beaker which has just launched on CBBC.
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