Anita and Me

Director Metin Hüseyin
UK 2002
92 minutes

Meena Bashkar is twelve and lives with her loving parents in Tollington, a village referred to somewhat optimistically as ‘the jewel of the Black Country’. It is 1972 and poised on the brink of her teenage years, Meena longs to leave the spangles and spacehoppers behind. Anita Rutter moves into the house next door complete with her fabulously dysfunctional family. Anita is 14 and represents everything Meena wishes to be: blond, beautiful, cool, worldly, outrageous. They team up and the film charts their friendship as they struggle individually with adolescence, family difficulties and the racism of peers.

Meena Syal’s first novel struck a chord with many who have endured, or even enjoyed a provincial girlhood, making us howl with the laughter of recognition. Now she has adapted the book for the screen but handed the directing duties to Metin Hüseyin, best known for his TV work on series such as ‘Common as Muck’

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