大象传媒

Edi Stark talks to actor and youth worker, Atta Yaqub about the highs and challenges of being catapulted to fame as a teenager. Cast with no acting experience, as leading man Casim Khan in Ken Loach鈥檚 muti award winning, Ae Fond Kiss was a dream he had never had and, as he emotionally tells Edi, as a teenager, he was unprepared for the backlash from his community who disapproved of some aspects of the film. His movie character, like him, is a Pakistani Muslim, but as we鈥檒l hear, with a different view of faith and marriage. He talks about now being a husband and father and reflects on his own childhood, growing up, the youngest of five children in a family living in the east end of Glasgow. His father came to Scotland from Pakistan and worked on the QE2 as an electronic engineer but died when Atta was four, so it was difficult for his mother who could only speak Punjabi and whose family still lived in Pakistan. Atta Yaqub had to grow up fast and explains that it鈥檚 a strong foundation for the life he has now.