Leaving your home for a distant land is difficult enough, but when you've effectively been forced out – and imprisoned and threatened with torture to ram home the message – it's all the harder, especially when you then have to re-establish your successful and high-profile career in a new country.

In many ways, however, Ingrid Sinclair and Simon Bright are far luckier than many of their Zimbabwean compatriates. At least they had a home to come to.

Ingrid, a documentary director, grew up in Weston-super-Mare before spending 18 years in Zimbabwe, where she met and married Simon, an independent film producer who was born in Zimbabwe.

That family history made the South West the obvious choice when the couple and their children – Leila, now 22, and Tom, 18 – were forced to leave Zimbabwe four years ago.

The couple feel "incredibly lucky" to have settled so happily in Bristol and to have been welcomed into the city's African community.

Proof of how quickly they've become established as part of the city's arts scene is their Afrika Eye film festival, which opens on Friday, and which they set up three years ago as a link with home.

Simon says: "It's one way of celebrating our African identity and at a very simple level it's also about building a market for future African film producers."

Adjusting to Britain's very different climate and culture was a real shock, admits Simon. "I found it incredibly alienating at first and everything was very difficult. You go to a train station and someone says 'Go to platform six' – you don't even know where to start looking for platform six," he chuckles.

Even more difficult was the problem of establishing themselves as film makers in the UK after two decades as leading members of Zimbabwe's independent film community. Ingrid and Simon's company, Zimmedia, had won many international awards for its work, both fiction and documentary.

However, as the Zimbabwean regime grew more hostile and repressive, Ingrid and Simon found it increasingly hard to operate.

Then in 2003, a film which Ingrid made, called Give Us Peace, left the couple in a very difficult position.

"It's about violence and how a government should treat its people," says Ingrid, over cups of tea at the couple's home in Cotham, Bristol.

At that time, film makers had to apply to the government for permission to make films. "They said no but I decided to make it anyway," says Ingrid.

But the couple found themselves being blackmailed by people who knew they'd made the film. They'd already come into major conflict with the government over an earlier film, Flame, about a woman solider in the war of liberation.

Eventually, they decided that Zimbabwe was too difficult for independent filmmakers and reluctantly headed for Bristol.

Unfortunately Simon still had unfinished work in Zimbabwe and when he went back to complete it, he was arrested and thrown in jail.

"I was in a cell designed for six people that had 26 people in it. You had to have plastic bags on your feet to wade to the toilet," he recalls.

He was interrogated several times and threatened with electric shock treatment in an attempt to make him admit to having helped in a BBC documentary exposing systematic rape in the ruling party's youth camps (he hadn't).

Luckily, Simon's "very brave" lawyer Beatrice Mtetwe got him out of jail and after keeping him under surveillance for two weeks, the authorities finally allowed him to leave.

This wasn't the first time Simon had found himself at odds with Zimbabwe's ruling elite. He grew up on a farm and his parents were opposed to the "police state" created by the white minority rule prime minister Ian Smith.

He had also fled Zimbabwe (or Rhodesia as it was then called) once before – as a draft dodger, avoiding call up to the Rhodesian army. But Simon returned home after Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980 and Robert Mugabe was elected as prime minister. It was a time of hope and optimism. Today, Zimbabwe's people are starving, its economy has collapsed and inflation runs at a staggering 11 million per cent.

But Simon admits to feeling guilty about having left: "There is a sense that my country is going downhill and I should be there doing something about it."

In 2006 he and Ingrid set up the Afrika Eye film festival, which runs this weekend at the Watershed and this year includes two premieres – Youssou N'Dour's great documentary Return to Goree in which the great Senegalese singer follows the trail left by slaves and the jazz music they invented, and the Sundance-nominated Son of Man from South Africa, in which the Gospels are retold as a tale of corruption and redemption in contemporary Africa.

Afrika Eye opens this Friday October 31 at 8 pm at the Watershed. Visit www.afrikaeye.btik.com