Simran Kaur 1970, from Dutch writer, actor and director Keshavi Jaharia, will screen at the festival in Seattle, Washington, which runs from 13 to 18 October 2026.
Produced by Sohail Anjum, Avanish Sharma and Swati Agarwal, the film recently had its world premiere at the Bengaluru International Short Film Festival in India, where it was a finalist in the Women’s Collective Award category.
Inspired by true events, Simran Kaur 1970 follows Simran, a young Indian bride-to-be who arrives at Heathrow Airport intending to marry her fiancé and begin a new life in Britain.
Instead, she is separated from other passengers and subjected to a cold and invasive bureaucratic procedure to determine whether she should be allowed to enter the country.
Through Simran’s experience, the film revisits a disturbing chapter of British immigration history and the use of so-called “virginity tests” on South Asian women arriving in the UK.
Jaharia said the film was intended not simply as a historical account, but as an examination of the way institutional harm can take place behind the language and procedures of officialdom.
“Simran Kaur 1970 is not just a historical account; it is a necessary excavation of a buried trauma that continues to resonate in conversations about borders, bodies and belonging,” she said.
“These examinations were not hidden acts of violence; they were carried out politely, procedurally and with official language. I wanted to observe how harm can exist inside a system that believes itself to be reasonable.”
She added: “We are thankful to the Tasveer Film Festival for providing Simran Kaur 1970 with a platform to bring this story to an American audience.”
The controversy surrounding virginity testing at Heathrow came to widespread public attention in 1979, following the case of a 35-year-old Indian woman who arrived in Britain intending to marry her fiancé.
The examinations were used by immigration officials in some cases involving women arriving from the Indian subcontinent, ostensibly as a means of determining whether women presenting themselves as unmarried fiancées were telling the truth about their marital status and sexual history.
The practice has since become recognised as an example of the discriminatory treatment faced by some migrant women at Britain’s borders.
Historical investigations subsequently revealed that dozens of women, predominantly from India and Pakistan, had been subjected to intimate examinations in connection with immigration decisions during the 1970s.
The controversy led to widespread condemnation and the practice at British borders was brought to an end in 1979.
More than four decades later, virginity testing was explicitly outlawed in England and Wales through the Health and Care Act 2022, which made carrying out, offering or aiding and abetting such examinations a criminal offence.
By revisiting that history through the experience of one woman, Simran Kaur 1970 places questions of migration, gender and institutional power at the centre of its story – while bringing a little-discussed episode in the experiences of South Asian women in Britain to a new generation of audiences.
The film will have its US premiere at the 21st Tasveer International Film Festival in Seattle, taking place from 13 to 18 October 2026.
