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TORN FROM TH
Writer-director Peter Kosminsky takes
us inside the mind of a suicide bomber in Britz, his epic new two-parter for Channel 4
Y
ou could never accuse filmmaker Peter Kosminsky of shirking the big issues. Just look at his trail-blazing TV track record. The titles alone of his searing docu-
dramas, which, to date, have earned him four BAFTAs as well as the Alan Clarke Award for Outstanding Creative Contribution to Television, speak volumes.
No Child Of Mine, The Dying Of The Light, Shoot To Kill, 15: The Life And Death Of Peter Knight, Innocents and Warriors have tackled everything from the fate of a Somalian aid worker and frontline soldiering to the scandal of the Bristol heart babies.
Then, in 2005, came The Government Inspector, which recreated the tragic last days of former weapons inspector, Dr David Kelly. As if the powers-that-be weren’t already wary of Kosminsky after his shamelessly Left-slanted The Project (about the rise of New Labour), the official draw- bridge was this time round well and truly raised.
And to make it even it even tricki- er for him, he also, for the first time, took on the mantle of writer when there was an amicable parting with the original author in the face of an almost overwhelming mountain of research material following the Hutton Inquiry.
In the event, the production proved a great audience and critical success. It also sealed an ongoing rela- tionship between Kosminsky, Mentorn Films and Channel 4, which has now resulted in, arguably, his most ambi- tious and potentially controversial tel- evision film to date.
Marking what has been described as Kosminsky’s first fully fictional TV project, Britz, which will
be aired as two two-hour films, tells the story of a second generation British Muslim brother-and-sister, whose paths then dramatically diverge. Each film will tell roughly the same story but from the different per- spective of the two siblings.
He explained what originally drew him to the idea: “Being second genera- tion British on my mother’s side – and third on my father’s – I have always detected in myself two competing forces. On the one hand, there’s a very strong desire to dig into British socie- ty, to be adopted by its institutions and become as British as I possibly could. On the other, there’s the tug of my antecedents and so to some extent a rejection that society, of not wanting to dismiss the past. So I always want- ed to write about those two pulls in a 2nd generation person.
“I decided to do it by splitting them into two personalities – a broth- er and a sister; he feels the desire to fit in and conform, while she’s the rebel. It’s overlaid by the fact that I always wanted a sister myself and in fact actually invented one and when I was first a father I’d even tell my chil- dren stories about this fictional sister.
“When I came to create the broth- er and sister for Britz and their rela- tionship, I thought it’d be interesting to use elements of the sister about whom I’d fantasised.”
As for the ‘z’ in Britz, Kosminsky said it referred to the fact that as an “awful lot of Pakistanis have names that end in ‘z’, I thought it would be an interesting if slightly obscure way of communicating that these people were British but with a kind of twist in the tail [or ‘tale’, for that matter] – that twist being they’re of Pakistani origin.”
But, of course, being a Kosminsky project, there is also a seriously timely element to the whole enterprise.
“At the risk of sounding pompous or self-serving, I think we’ve all been rather failed by the journalistic profes- sion in terms of this whole concept of suicide bombers. These people are usually depicted as insane zealots and like with anyone whose actions seem to be completely evil, you don’t do anyone, particularly their victims, any kind of service by just dismissing them as two-dimensional cardboard cut-out villains.
“I thought there was a job of work to be done in trying to understand how a British person, someone born and brought up here, - as was the case with some of the bombers here in July 2005 – could end up blowing them- selves up in a public place. What sort of journey did they go on, what was their family like, what were the coun- tervailing pressures? To what extent has Britain’s foreign policy been a fac- tor in that journey?
“People don’t just sort of land on the public stage full-grown as suicide bombers. Anyway that’s what I set out to do: to create a family, one member of which ends up taking this very extreme position, and try to figure out why this might have been.”
To help bring this story - based in the Bradford/Leeds area and in Pakistan - to the screen, Kosminsky turned once again to cinematographer David Higgs. Britz is their fourth col- laboration in seven years after Innocents, The Project and The Government Inspector.
Apart from a week (of the 12 weeks) shooting exteriors and mainly interiors in the North of England, the rest of the schedule, boasting more than 160 locations, was, effectively, cheating. Everything else was filmed in London and Hyderabad, India.
Some of the key scenes feature life inside a Pakistani training camp in
Photo: Peter Kosminsky, left, on location with some of the cast of Britz
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