ABOUT THE SHOW

From multi-award winning writer-director Peter Kosminsky comes the BAFTA-winning thriller, Britz. This gripping controversial two-part thriller features two young British Muslims, a brother and sister, each pulled in radically different directions by conflicting personal experiences in post 9/11 Britain with shocking results.

Sohail and Nasima are a young brother and sister born and bred in Bradford, whose constantly overlapping lives end up taking perilously different paths. The first film tells Sohail's story and the second Nasima's. From two differing points of view, we watch their hopes and ideals clash with the reality of being a young Muslim in Britain today.

With action set in Pakistan, Eastern Europe, London, and Northern England, the gritty and unflinching drama follows a tragic sequence of events from two distinct perspectives with a revealing examination of British Muslim life under current anti-terror legislation. Britz ultimately asks whether the laws we think are making us safer, are actually putting us in greater danger.

"Britz is not the story of the September 11 bombers or the July 7 bombers. It's a fictional tale of two second-generation Muslims who respond in radically different ways to growing up in 21st Century Britain," says Kosminsky. "In common with my country, America has a sizable second-generation Muslim population. A significant proportion of that population is reportedly as disillusioned with your foreign policy as British Muslims are with ours. The issues raised ought then to be just as timely - and just as hard to confront - on your side of the pond as they were and are on ours."

Britz is a fiction, a thriller, but it is set squarely in the real world. It deals with the notion of identity and divided loyalties, the duality of being both British and Muslim. The title of the drama comes from the Muslim predilection for shortening first names and ending them with a zed - Nasima's friends call her Naz. Britz takes the raft of immigration, anti-terror and anti-social behavior legislation that has been introduced since 2001 and asks what it actually means for citizens on the ground, in particular those who are British and Muslim.