Lahore, Feb 04: Lahore's Odeon Cinema has seen better days. The Punjabi song-and-dance feature on the screen plays to rows of empty seats, the scratchy image and crackling soundtrack as old as the memory of a packed house.
Pakistan's once thriving film industry, which used to pump out 80 to 100 movies a year, is in terminal decline. Cinemas are closing at an alarming rate, and owners say only lifting a 40-year-old ban on showing movies made in India can save them from a very unhappy ending.
The Lahore-based movie business - known as Lollywood, similar to its Bombay cousin Bollywood - has suffered from the booming sales of pirated movies on video tape and DVD, and the recent spread of cable TV showing Bollywood blockbusters.
Only about 25 mainstream movies were made in Pakistan in 2004, and most bombed. "The situation is growing worse by the day. Urdu and Punjabi cinema is almost doomed," said Shazad Gul, respected movie director and chief of Evernew Studio, the main production facility for Pakistani cinema in this eastern city.
Gul, whose late father Agha was regarded as the country's first movie mogul, is converting sound stages on the aging Evernew lot for television, seeing a much brighter future in making drama serials for the growing number of private TV networks.
Dwindling cinema revenues mean that the films that do make it on the big screen are usually cheap productions with hackneyed plots and the same few actors that can only attract audiences with lots of blood-spilling and sexual innuendo - the latter tame by Hollywood standards.
Bureau Report
