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According to a Business Recorder survey, Pakistan film industry continued its unabated downswing in the year 2003, resulting in business losses of over Rs 250 million to the producers and financiers alone.

So much so that out of nearly 50 films reportedly released in national and regional languages, none except a numbered few, that is, the ones made in Pushto language of the Northwest, managed to recover actual investment.

Out of the total 50 movies produced in the year, 15 were in Urdu, 19 in Punjabi and 15 in Pushto language from a total investment of Rs 302 million, of which no more than Rs 50 million could be recovered, the rest of the money going down the drain, as usual.

As for the overall performance of the industry in the year under review, the BR survey has found it thoroughly disappointing, quoting the views of a wide section of experts, critics and film fans.

All in all, the overall gloom on the cinema front has been attributed to a combination of factors, including pirated scripts, poor standard of direction, dearth of technical facilities, the booming cable TV channels, CDs, increasing use of substandard raw material, besides the glaring lack of concern, as usual for education and training to lift the standard of film-making both as business and art.

All in all, as such, the Survey report will be seen as an elegy on the state of the Pakistani film industry, coming at a time of greater expectations of a turn towards better.

This, of course, has reference to signs of a likely upsurge towards catching up with the ways in which the Indian movie-makers have managed to carve out a place head and shoulders above the world's leading film industries.

It will be recalled that, seemingly learning the right lessons from the Indian movie-moguls to meet the demand of modern cinema a number of producers, directors, actors and investors kept hopes alive in Pakistan of making a major breakthrough.

It will, however, be noted that the ripples they succeeded in creating fell too short of the overall retrieval.

This should leave little to doubt in view of the causes of snail's pace progress the industry made. For one thing, many and varied are the major causes that have been identified for failure in that direction.

According to the Survey, the cinematographers have shifted the responsibility of failure of films on to the producers, saying they, while compromising on quality, took recourse to the use of substandard material to cut the cost of production.

It has also been stated that around as much as 40 percent raw material used in film-making has been of low quality, which, along with growing practice of film-making on contract basis (one-spell) has contributed in no small way to the poor quality of the end product.

Now all such effort can be seen as having added nothing new to the decline of the Pakistani film-making centre from the proud status it had acquired in the pre-independence set-up.

This, has reference to the prominence Lahore had gained, away from with Bombay and Calcutta in the subcontinent in years close to independence.

It will be recalled that in the rapid strides of the film revolution, it had already left Calcutta behind and started vying with Bombay. And that was attributable largely to the abundance of the human talent, encompassing writers, actors and actresses, producers and those others excelling in performing arts. Many a film celebrity from the NWFP and the Punjab made their way to Bombay, and vice versa to the growing gain of the subcontinent's cinema.

After independence, many stayed behind there, others staging a comeback later to their homeland from a sense of national service. But it proved of little avail, in so far as the dream of glorification of national film industry is concerned. So, if Pakistan film industry desires to carve a future for itself, it will call for a whole new effort, the parameters of which will have to be determined in the larger context of the entire subcontinent's cinema.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2004


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