Who would have thought that this small budget film made for Channel 4 from a script by a then unknown writer about a young Pakistani Londoner (Gordon Warnecke), his ambitions for his uncle’s laundrette and his developing relationship with a skinhead (Daniel Day-Lewis in a breakthrough role) would become one of the most successful and iconic films of the 80s?

My Beautiful Laundrette established the career of writer Hanif Kureishi, launched the cinema star that is Daniel Day-Lewis and catapulted director Stephen Frears into the cinema fast lane. This controversial culture-clash comedy captured the tensions of multiculturalism and Thatcherism whilst its central gay inter racial relationship was both praised and criticised.

The film is the very definition of intersectionality! Today, the issues it grapples with still feels relevant, and its deliberately awkward politics of new money, entrepreneurial possibility and neoliberalism, coupled with the presence of disenfranchised white working class, and the foregrounding of a gay relationship make the film resonate loudly 40 years on.

With an in-person introduction and discussion with film director Stephen Frears, actor Gordon Warnecke and a remote contribution from writer Hanif Kureishi hosted by Cinema Rediscovered’s Mark Cosgrove.