The film, East is East, has been described as a "rip-roaring comedy", based on a play by Ayub Khan-Din, who is himself of Pakistani origin. It revolves around the lives and times of a mixed race family in the 1970s Salford, once a thriving mill town on the edge of Manchester, with all the tragi-comedy generated by the cultural confusion and the generational divide of an immigrant family.

Puri, described by one critic as the "holding centre" of the film, plays George Khan (Genghis to his seven children). George owns a fish-n-chip shop and Basset is his long-suffering wife, who despite everything, including the fact that she does not share George's "traditions", still loves him.

The play had been staged in London last yearand received well by the audiences. The Guardian film critic, Derek Malcolm, has commented that Dublin-based director Damien O'Donnell's film is "funny without being patronising, warm without being sentimental and strongly characterised almost always, but not quite without recourse to parody", a criticism that the play too had faced.

But clearly, cinema audiences couldn't care less. According to a report in The Guardian: "Prolonged ovations greeted both its screenings (at Cannes) and the kind of audience reaction which hasn't been seen since The Full Monty." It added: "Members of the audience started laughing in the first minute and didn't stop. The dialogue was often drowned out. At the end they stomped their feet, clapped for almost seven minutes and called for the director and cast to take a bow on stage."

East is East has also drawn a positive critical response with predictions that its "warm, broad humour will be an unlikely multiplex hit". Of the film's potentialprofitability at the box office there is one clue - the distribution rights have been snapped up by Miramax, whose recent successes include Shakespeare In Love and Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth.

This is not Om Puri's first British film. Two years ago he had played the lead role in Hanif Kureishi's My Son the Fanatic. Playing a Pakistani taxi driver in love with an English prostitute, his character in that film was almost the opposite of George Khan. He was a liberal whiskey drinking man, with a passion for jazz, who could not understand why his son had turned to Muslim fundamentalists.