PAKISTAN TO LIFT BAN ON BOLLYWOOD MOVIES

Feb 15, 2008

BANGALORE - The Pakistan government is poised to lift a 43-year ban on the import of movies from India. This will mean that some time soon Pakistanis will be watching the latest Bollywood movies on the big screen.Late last month, Pakistan’s parliamentary committee on culture recommended the lifting of the ban on Hindi films. “We have devised a mechanism for allowing the import of Indian films for a period of one year, after which the arrangements can be reviewed,” Senator Zafar Iqbal Chaudhry, who heads the committee, said. The recommendation now awaits cabinet approval, which is expected to come soon.Details are unclear, but it appears the import of Bollywood movies is conditional on India importing an equal number of Pakistani movies.The ban on Bollywood movies was imposed in 1965, following the India-Pakistan war that year. The decision to lift the ban indicates how far the normalization of the India-Pakistan bilateral relationship has moved. But also, it is an attempt that recognizes the situation on the ground. The lifting appears to have come on the urging of a section of Pakistan’s film industry. Film distributors and cinema owners have been calling on the government to allow Bollywood to breathe new life into their comatose industry. Pakistan had 1,300 cinema halls in the 1970s. Today, there are barely 275 halls, many of them in poor condition. The return of Bollywood to the cinema halls, distributors hope, will revive their fading fortunes and provide a shot in the arm to business.