Asian 123

Over the last few years, the story we have been hearing about British Asian men has been overwhelmingly negative. But for some British Asian communities there are real problems. In this personal film, Mehreen Baig, a British-Pakistani woman, goes behind the headlines and meets a range of young men to understand their experiences of growing up in modern Britain. As a state school teacher, Mehreen saw British Asian boys from some communities falling behind.

Jim Hurley and Matthew Montfort's shared violin-and-guitar-line leads catch hold of a strong melody and bite down hard. But despite Zhao Hui's Chinese gu sheng board zither, Bui Hui Nhut's dan bao Vietnamese one-stringed lute, and assorted ethnic percussion, vernacular instruments don't share equal weight with the band's folk-classical thrust, and the cuts that are carved from indigenous music — "The Dusk Song of the Fisherman" or the lovely Indonesian degung of "Sunda Strait" — tilt somewhat toward the generic. Still, the disc's got plenty of fire, and its loveliness often surprises.