It takes a village to raise a child,” says the proverb. Yet three dynamic South Asian volunteers from Bradford were hearing that this was no longer happening.

“It came across that there was a barrier between the youth and the elderly,” said Tahera Kacholia, one of the trio who work with women’s groups in their community.

Rubina Niazi agreed: “The ladies were complaining about the young people, saying that they don’t listen nowadays.” And that “they don’t sit with their grandparents. They don’t talk,” added Ghazala Khalid.

So the idea was born for a project that would bring the generations together to try to bridge that divide.

Coincidentally, award-winning film-maker Heenan Bhatti (Channel 4 programmes The Great British School Swap and Make Bradford British) of Leeds-based ClockWork Films had been commissioned by the BBC’s Head of Religion and Ethics, Daisy Scalchi, to make a documentary on the subject of South Asian “aunties”.

The result was The Bradford Aunties, a BBC One documentary broadcast last year. A year later, RTS Yorkshire brought together the film-maker, the three aunties, Kacholia, Niazi and Khalid, and other participants to discuss the programme.

“Auntie” is an honorific title given to the matriarchs in South Asian communities whose unofficial job, traditionally, was to police the mores and morals of the younger generation, especially girls and young women.

Hassan Hussain, one of the younger participants in the project, summed up their role with a smile: “The neighbourhood watch!”

Bhatti told the audience: “We got some money from the BBC to develop the idea. We went around the country, looking for aunties... then we came across [Bradford community centre] WomenZone and the aunties here. We loved them. It was a no-brainer.”

WomenZone was offering traditional music, Urdu and Punjabi lessons, sessions on how to sew and cook – plus an intergenerational coach trip to Blackpool. Its project dovetailed with Bhatti’s aims for his documentary.

The unexpected dimension of being filmed, recalled Niazi, “at first made us feel nervous and shy. As time passed, we became a bit more open in front of the camera, and we could say whatever we wanted because the cameraman was so friendly.”

However, as the group began to bond over the course of the sessions, the aunties began to open up about their marriages.

Event host, writer and director Shazia Ashraf, asked how difficult this had been for the aunties, “knowing that the whole world was going to see things we usually keep private”.

“It was hard at the beginning, and I thought, ‘Gosh am I going to do this?’” admitted Kacholia. “But the good thing about it was that, when I started speaking about my marriage, I could see that everybody in that group wanted to speak about their experience... the frustrations and challenges they faced. We’re not going to solve everything, but we learned so much from each other.”

This openness appealed to younger participant Kainaat Mughal. She experienced domestic violence in her marriage, and had been made to feel ashamed and at fault for her divorce. She had come along to the first WomenZone meeting “to ruffle feathers”.

Being part of the project “made me understand that there are other aunties out there who don’t have the same mindset as those I had been exposed to,” she said.

“The most important thing is that, if we don’t vocalise how we feel, how are the older generation, the aunties, supposed to understand us?”

The film has had a huge emotional impact yet includes so much laughter too.

“A lot of documentaries can be quite dark,” Bhatti said. “And I do get that. But what I wanted was to bring the aunties to a mainstream audience.

“Comedy is a great shortcut to emotion and to understanding things, although we didn’t run away from the tough stuff,” he said. “To make people feel something, as well as understand something, is a real step up.”