A Way of life, British cinema and new British identities

An article that uses Amma Asante's film A Way of Life as the main focus of how contemporary cinema in Wales and, to some extent Scotland and Ireland, has begun to open up questions around postcolonial identity at the British 'margins'. Asante's film centres on a racist murder in the South Wales Valleys and raises vital and interesting questions about not only race, but gender as components of contemporary Welsh identity. A Way of Life will be examined in the context of other examples of recent British cinema such as Ken Loach's Ae Fond Kiss, which draws on the diverse ethnicity of contemporary Glasgow in a post 9/11 context in order to understand some of the ways that cinema is seeking to make sense of a fracturing British identity and Perry Ogden's Pavee Lackeen, a study of a traveller family living on the margins of Ireland's so-called Celtic Tiger economy.