Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha has a new, contemporary adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in the works.
With films including Bhaji On The Beach, Bend It Like Beckham and Blinded By The Light, Gurinder Chadha has long since established herself as a filmmaker capable of tackling contemporary subjects with a lightness of touch and broad appeal.
It’s a style that’s set to continue with her film for Disney – more on that in a sec – and another project we hadn’t previously learned about: a modern adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
As reported by Variety, the film came to light when Chadha was in the UK’s House of Commons and talking about the state of the British film industry. There, she revealed that her Christmas Carol would have a British Indian protagonist. Her “Scrooge is an Indian Tory who hates refugees,” she said.
“It’s very close to Dickens’ original themes,” the director said, adding that they’d been given a contemporary twist to include the cost of living crisis that has blighted the country in recent years, and the subject of immigration, which the Conservative party has kept in the headlines with its somewhat nebulous plan to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda.
According to Chadha, she’d even spoken to the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, who requested that Chadha’s film didn’t “make him look bad.”
Chadha’s response: a pithy “I don’t have to do that for you.”
Podcast: In conversation with Gurinder Chadha OBE (recorded at the London Film Festival)
Chadha said that the film was “a struggle to finance,” partly because “the lead character is Indian. And I’ve always had that with the films I’ve made.”
In the meantime, Chadha’s most high-profile project is that aforementioned Disney movie; she says that the head of Disney had contacted her to make an ‘Indian princess’ film for the studio, and that she’s been working on a script since then.
“They could have easily got an American person who’s done loads of Disney films,” she said, “[but] they actually came and sought culturally the right person… in fact the Disney Princess is actually quite a British film about a princess who’s Indian – but it will become a very Disney branded film.”
It sounds intriguing, certainly, but the film we’re really desperate to see is Chadha’s A Christmas Carol. Given the often cruel political rhetoric surrounding asylum seekers and refugees in the UK, a film that argues for compassion could be a timely and much-needed tonic.
More as we get it.
