Tannishtha Chatterjee with director Sarah Gavron on the sets of Brick Lane in Calcutta. Picture by Aranya Sen

Last week some lucky people at the Telluride Film Festival, Colorado, got to see the world premiere of Brick Lane. And judging by their reaction, come the international release in November and we might be in for a treat.

Directed by newcomer Sarah Gavron, the film version of Monica Ali’s novel follows the life of protagonist Nazneen. The character is taken on by actress Tannishtha Chatterjee — who trained at the National School of Drama in Delhi. Her portrayal was described by Rediff as “a star-making vehicle”. The film also got a follow-up screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the Hollywood Reporter described it as “beautifully acted and written”.

Also this month, Al Jazeera’s programme Witness showed a short documentary by British Asian filmmaker Rajesh Thind on his search for a wife. Rajesh is encouraged by all manner of people to promote his marital availability through agencies, online and off — but he turns his handheld camera back on them. The result is rather delightful: we see Rajesh’s 70-year-old father telling him he’ll arrange meetings with “hundreds” of British Punjabi women. When Rajesh protests — “I’m not going to go to people’s houses to look at their daughters; there’s no way!” — his father replies: “You are the hero of the film now and the hero should be vigilant and active.” Rajesh heads off to Suman — the oldest Indian marriage bureau in the UK — and meets a manager who explains, exactingly: “This is not a forced marriage. This is an assisted arranged marriage”. Rajesh also hears that the three ingredients for a successful marriage are “honesty, respect and then love” — and even that Shilpa Shetty is looking for a husband. “That wouldn’t be too bad — I’d quite like to marry a Bollywood starlet,” Rajesh quips.

Talking of Shilpa, the news is out that the Celebrity Big Brother diva is set to launch a musical in Berlin, Miss Bollywood. Shilpa’s publicist Dale Bhagwagar said that the upcoming show is “designed to familiarise the West about Bollywood and Indian culture”. Shilpa and the troupe of 34 dancers and eight actors are scheduled to tour Britain, the US and Australia after opening in Berlin in October.

Having to wait for both Shilpa and Brick Lane, I killed time by checking out one of the big hits of the summer in the UK, Two Days in Paris. The film starts out as a trendy bilingual Anglo-French rom-com. It sees 30-something Frenchwoman Marion (Julie Delpy, who also wrote the script, directed and produced) take her New York lover Jack (Adam Goldberg) to her hometown of Paris. The film is acted with a wonderful conversational naturalness, but towards the end slides into something bordering on pop francophobia. The jokes about endlessly fornicating and wine-swilling middle-class Parisians (and their racist taxi drivers) are hilarious at first. But the see-sawing of cultural jibes finishes with neurotic, promiscuous Paris thudding firmly to the ground. Otherwise, this is funny, stylish and charming.

Jack Lamport (A writer and part-time actor based in London)