In Bend It Like Beckham, Mr. Bhamra (Anupam Kher) makes a powerful statement to a room full of British Punjabi relatives right after his daughter Jess (Parminder Nagra) says she wants to go to the U.S. to train for soccer: I want her to win.

I still remember seeing my father, sitting in our Calcutta living room, tear up watching this moment. When the film, directed by Gurinder Chadha, was released in 2002, Hindi films fed us a very different idea of father figures angry, rigid and just generally apathetic to the personal freedoms of the women in their family. Twenty years later, the films biggest legacy is that it didnt teach us to be better daughters but it taught parents to be better parents.

In Bend It Like Beckham, Jess is the soccer-obsessed Punjabi daughter of immigrants growing up in Southall who joins a womens soccer team. Her parents would rather have her pursue higher studies and pick up domestic skills on the side. While she often sneaks away to play matches, things come to a head when she is spotted by a talent scout and is awarded a fellowship to train in the U.S., on the very day her older sister is getting married. The film helped change the way the world spoke of South Asian immigrants, viewed diasporic cinema, and the way in which films approached gender and sports.

There had been films mostly of the indie, arthouse, festival-touring type that had explored the never the twain shall meet lives of diasporic South Asians in Britain. In fact, Chadha made the criminally underseen Bhaji on the Beach in 1994. But Bend It Like Beckham was a watershed moment within British culture because it took British Asians to the mainstream, outside of the limits of exclusive film festivals and word-of-mouth recommendations.

For British South Asians like Syima Aslam, director and founder of the Bradford Literature Festival, who was in college when she watched the film, it was the creation of a unique visual culture that was moving away from Bollywood which she enjoyed but didnt quite identify with and the social tropes of arranged marriage, conservative parenting and a general lack of agency for women that were prevalent around South Asian immigrants in the U.K.

When I saw it, I went, This is us. This is our life. This is how we live. South Asian and British, Aslam said. The film was as British as the soccer-loving, Beckham-worshiping Jess, and as Punjabi as the Gurudwara-going, aloo-gobi-eating Jess.