NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

Micitype Pretty Good

Brainsbell The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Verity Robins Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

ullethestrange „Yasmin" gives a very good impression of the problems that aroused for Muslim people in England after the 9/11 incident. The film is about a young Muslim woman called Yasmin who tries to find her own identity between her two lives: that of a modern British woman and the traditional Muslim life she leads at home. She has to deal with rejection by her English colleagues, an unwanted marriage that her father has arranged for her and a brother who slips more and more into his very own world of fear, hate and terror. It is very interesting to watch Yasmin take her decisions, almost finding answers to her questions and then experiencing something that makes her change her views all over again. The tense atmosphere of the film is created by the settings; the scenes are mostly set in poorly lit, small and kind of filthy rooms which make you feel claustrophobic. And also the music of the film can make you feel uneasy. In the beginning, it is very quiet. Then Yasmin's brother Nasir starts to sing lines from the Koran, and the sound of that noise echoing in the empty streets of the town makes you shiver. I think it's sad that there is so little interaction between Yasmin and Nasir during the film. Because that means you don't really see anything of Yasmin's emotional reaction to Nasir's change of mind and his decision to join a terrorist group. I can also not comprehend Yasmin's decision to help Faisal when he comes out of prison. Before he went there, she just wanted to get rid of him. When she finally got the chance to do so, she didn't take it. Yasmin could have simply made him say "I divorce you" when he came out of prison, but she took him home and suddenly started to care for him. She also started to wear her traditional clothes when she went to town, and read the Koran. I don't believe a grown up and independent woman can change her views and her life overnight and let a book and a religion that she has never found so important before dictate her decisions. Another thing I'd like to criticize is the ending of the film. I find the very open ending kind of disappointing. In the beginning, Yasmin was confused about who she was, then 9/11 came, took her brother and her friends away, and in the end she was not really one step closer to a solution to her problems. She did change during the film, but you don't really get an answer to whether it was for the better. Maybe this is supposed to express that a solution to the problems between cultures has not yet been found and so on, but I still think the ending is lame. It kind of leaves you hanging in midair. All in all, the film is about some very bad things that happen to a poor Muslim girl, and that is very touching and exciting to watch, but it actually is what I hear and see every day. I don't have to watch a movie to learn it.

esra_laske The film „Yasmin" directed by Kenny Glenaan has won an award at the Edingburgh festival. The film deals with the consenquences of 9/11 for a Muslim community in Northern England and is a moving portrayal of a Muslim family living in a mill town.Yasmin is of Muslim background but has grown up in England. She wants to conform to the western life although her family are traditional Muslims. She goes to work, drives a car and behaves like an English girl outside her house. At home she holds the family together and tries to fulfill her role as a Muslim woman. Yasmin is a strong character because she manages to deal with these totally different worlds. Still her father, a warm-hearted man, is not happy with her behavior. And there is also Yasmin's brother. He is a typical teenager; he wants to be rebellious and tries to break free. Yasmin is like a best friend to him.You can relate to Yasmin because she is just a "normal" woman who wants her freedom, independence and to take her own decisions. It is shown wonderfully how she tries to break free from a conservative life.The film is really touching because one realizes how little you about the Muslims in England and how unfairly they have been treated after 9/11. There are hilarious but also breathtaking moments in this drama

luisa-m The director of the movie „Yasmin", Kenny Gleenan, won a prize at the Edinburgh Festival for best British feature. As he says his movie is "between fiction and documentary" because the plot and the characters are not real but the story is quite realistic. Gleenan's movie is about Yasmin who lives with her Pakistani family in the north of England. The whole conflict in this movie is about Yasmin who tries to find her identity but she does not know whether she finds it in her traditional Muslim or in her modern world. So the movie is about (mis-) trust, disappointment and hope.The main character in the feature film is the young, impulsive and self-confident woman Yasmin Husseini. Then there is her warm-hearted but strict father Khalid Husseini who is powerless to control his children and to guide them "the right way". He really tries hard to stop his son Nasir from becoming a freedom fighter. When Khalid fails, you really feel sympathy for him. Yasmin's younger brother Nasir does not only want to risk his life for Islam but is also fascinated by the opportunities the modern world offers him. The fourth main character is John Bailey, a real Englishman. He is Yasmin's colleague at work and between these two there is a certain connection. It could have ended in love but Yasmin has difficulties being frank about her situation at home. All four characters make a certain development in the movie, some positive, others negative.The director shows very well which prejudices and problems exist in a complex society and he does not put the blame on the one or the other. It is quite difficult to combine a traditional Muslim and a modern, western life style but the movie shows that people have different possibilities to deal with this problem. I really can recommend the movie to everyone because it shows the conflict from a new and neutral perspective. It is not just one side that makes mistakes and you really start to think about the actuality of these problems. For getting more into a new culture, the movie is expressive, too.

bjtborthakur Yasmin is a relatively low budget, British-financed and made film about a young, attractive, British Pakistani Muslim woman brought up in northern England. That is an unusual and welcome starting point for a film. However, the film's weaknesses do not overcome this stimulating basis.Yasmin (Archie Panjabi, with a strong performance that suffers from the script, and who at times seems to be playing more towards her own background rather than Yasmin's) works for some sort of charity or social services. She is in an arranged marriage with Faysal (Shahid Ahmed, playing well given the limitations of his role) and Nasir (newcomer Syed Ahmed in a powerful performance) is a devoted but restrictive father. Her family lives through the attitudes to non-white Britons and to the changes wrought by 9/11.Given the appropriate shooting style (the first DoP was sacked; replacement Toni Slater-Ling has done a fine job of making things interesting without coating them in sugar), the competent and sometimes excellent direction from former actor Kenny Glenaan and generally fine performances all round, it is on the writing and plotting that criticism must centre.Unfortunately writer Simon Beaufoy's script is one that flashes with occasional brilliance before subsiding into a hinterland between credibility and exploitation. Much has been made in the publicity for Yasmin about the extensive workshopping process that led to the script. The idea for the film started with the Oldham and Bradford riots of 1999, before morphing into rather different territory under the pressure of 9/11. The film never does manage to balance between these two poles.A film inspired by those riots would need a sharply observed sense of place, and of the mixture of identities inherent in being born non-white in Britain. Yasmin has the latter, though the identities are rather crudely displayed sometimes, but it does not have the former. The workshops took place "across the north" and the film is set in what is described in the publicity as "a northern mill town". Quite what the presence of a mill has to do with anything in a northern town today - except tourism - is baffling. Yasmin was actually shot in Keighley. Not making the location explicit is understandable, but the idea of an interchangeable 'north' betrays the same lack of precision that afflicts the characters.To encompass differences of gender, nationality, religion and age is to ask a great deal of any character or script, and it proves too much for either the film or Yasmin to bear. Her character, so central to the film, is forced to display these different identities rather than possess them. She is therefore left with little sense of self to give to the viewer.The beautifully realised opening, entirely without dialogue for a good few minutes, is the strongest part of the film, but is the base it then goes on to ignore. Yasmin's work is what enables her to escape the binds of the other parts of her identity, and yet we never find out what it is. It funds the Golf cabriolet she drives (there's even a line of dialogue on this); it gives her a life away from her husband and her home; she is employee of the month (which we only find out when someone has drawn an Osama-style beard on the picture). It is about as realistic a portrayal of work as an average Hollywood movie.Yasmin's work also represents an independence that doesn't seem to fit with an arranged marriage. Quickly it is made clear that the marriage is an unhappy one, her husband Faysal - the "thick Paki" as she describes him - being more concerned with his new goat than in trying to bridge the gap to his wife.The only character who isn't required to represent things beyond his character, and is therefore the strongest, is the father. Setna infuses the struggles of maintaining a family, traditions and sanity with palpable tastes of loss, confusion and frustration.Finally, then, Yasmin is a victim of over-ambition. If there had been more time devoted to the atmosphere in Britain between Muslims and Christians before and after 9/11, perhaps we would have heard the two leaders' words in a more different context. If there had been time to explore Yasmin's marriage to Faysal, we might have been able to understand better why she turns to him amidst the difficulties of his and then her arrest. If there had been time to sketch race relations (as opposed to religious ones) in Britain before 9/11 we might have had a better understanding of the film's setting and of the struggles within Yasmin's family. If we had seen more of the role of the mosque in that community, we might have been able to understand better the attraction Nasir feels towards becoming involved with terrorists. As those terrorists tell Nasir, "the war against Islam has gone global". In which case there is all the more need for specifics, for an understanding which can only come through exploration, not display.Although Yasmin tries to do far too much, it is an interesting to watch it do so. So far there are distributors for most of Europe except the UK, which is something that should change, for this unbalanced and unusual film is worth watching nonetheless.