Featuring stars including Riz Ahmed and Nabhaan Rizwan, the event aims to celebrate the ‘rich tapestry of Muslim experiences via the medium of film’

The UK’s first major film festival dedicated to Muslim cinema announced its inaugural lineup on Tuesday, with a slew of award-winning films featuring the likes of Riz Ahmed and Informer’s Nabhaan Rizwan .

Ahmed, winner of an Oscar for best live action short film, will appear in Dammi, a short film directed by Yann Demange, the French film-maker best known for Top Boy and Northern Ireland-set drama ’71. Ahmed co-stars with Isabelle Adjani in a story about a man confronting his French and Algerian heritage on a trip to Paris. Rizwan plays the lead in In Camera, a British feature directed by Naqqash Khalid that screened at the London film festival, as an actor struggling to make a career in the film industry in the face of repeated rejections.

This documentary is an inspiring look at the astonishingly brave activists who took on the National Front in the 1970s and 80s – and changed Britain for the better. It’s full of dark parallels with today

With a prime minister, first minister for Scotland and London mayor all of south Asian descent the UK has changed dramatically in the 50 years since the events of Channel 4’s Defiance: Fighting the Far Right. While anti-British Asian sentiment is still rife – and you only have to look at the treatment of Britain’s cricket stars or read about the 31% pay gap between white men and Pakistani women to realise that we don’t live in a post-racial utopia – the progress made in the decades since the events of the programme is still staggering. Increased tolerance is not something that naturally evolved, however, and this three-part documentary shows how the British Asian community stood up to the racism that sought to destroy it – and fought for their right to live with dignity.

This series – produced by Riz Ahmed’s production company – covers the period between 1976 and 1981 when the population in Southall, west London, was 50% Asian and the area was targeted by the National Front. It begins with the stabbing to death of the teenager Gurdip Singh Chaggar. His murder shook his community but was met by indifference by the police – and led to a bone-chilling threat from the former National Front chairman John Kingsley Read: “One down, one million to go.” When the people of Southall took to the streets in protest they found themselves confronted by far-right thugs and a police force uninterested in protecting them from the wave of violence.

Christos Nikou’s English-language debut aims to be a sadistically comical treatment of relationship insecurity, but ends up saying little

Within the first few minutes of Christos Nikou’s sci-fi-inflected satire Fingernails, in which a medical test has been devised to determine whether two subjects are truly in love, viewers will probably ask themselves why anyone would trust the readout of a machine over their own heart. The only feasible motivation presented in the film is that it helps predict the likelihood of divorce in future – but why throw away a good relationship just because a microwave attached to a vintage TV set said so? Rational audiences will quickly conclude that we can’t do better than to follow the nudges of our desires, and pay the magic love science – how does one measure love, anyway? – about as much mind as we would a compatibility quiz in the back of a magazine. And yet it takes the characters in this misbegotten speculative thought experiment nearly two hours to figure that out and notice the gaping hole in the middle of a paper-thin premise.

Nikou, formerly an assistant director to his Greek countryman Yorgos Lanthimos, makes his English-language debut in much the same way as his mentor did, with a conceptual amendment to the laws of attraction. But where Lanthimos’ film The Lobster brought a mordant non-realism to a take-no-prisoners spin on dating, this film takes a more pedestrian approach to relationship insecurity, with one quirky hook. Following the sadistically comical lines laid down by Lanthimos, Fingernails’ storyline requires that all test participants allow an administrator to rip off a nail with a pair of pliers. Even that has a literal-minded stupidity to it: an opening title card states that malfunctions of the heart first manifest as symptoms in the fingernails, and in a moment of desperation, one woman becomes convinced that they are the source of her anxiety, that stubbier digits will erase her problems.

Fingernails premieres on Apple TV+ on 3 November