Preview: Bite The Mango Festival, Various Venues, Bradford

Fruits of the East - and beyond

Bite the Mango was established to showcase the work of black and Asian film-makers in the UK. It evolved to focus on Bollywood, and now has a truly international flavour, with Burkina Faso and Senegal included this year.

Irfan Ajeeb, the festival director, hopes to improve on last year's doubling of attendances. "It's for everyone who loves films. It's the perfect opportunity to learn about different cultures."

Highlights include the opening-night gala screening of Black Friday, a controversial (it is banned in India) but critically acclaimed treatment of the 1993 Mumbai bombings. "Festivals shouldn't shy away from showing these films. They're very much a reflection of the world we're living in," Ajeeb says. Other challenging films include Jihad! and Reinventing the Taliban?.

Pakistan is the festival's "country in focus". Ajeeb wants to show people that Pakistani films "are not all three-hour song-and-dance routines that are not very good and don't have a very big budget".

Also on the menu are Hong Kong action flicks, Japanese manga, Bollywood, script classes and star guests. Among Ajeeb's tips are the light-hearted One Dollar Curry, about a Punjabi man who opens a restaurant in Paris, and Le Grand Voyage, a French-Moroccan film following a father and son's journey to Mecca.

Why the "mango" of the festival's title? Ajeeb says: "The mango is associated with the Asian subcontinent. It's juicy and very rich. The name raises curiosity and gets people asking, but we have yet to come up with a formal explanation."

23-29 September (0870 701 0200; www.bitethemango.org.uk)