End near for Bangladesh cinemas
habshi
culture . Why would Bollywood and regional film industries in India be
booming ? Reconvert now to glorious paganism.
excerpt dawn.com
Curtains closing on Bangladesh’s cinemas
By Shafiq Alam
DHAKA: For 37 years, Taraknath Chowdhury has spent every day sitting
behind a booth in a corner of one of the Bangladeshi capital’s most
famous cinemas.
This month, however, the 59-year-old will end his career when the
three-storey Star Cinema closes to make way for a high-rise apartment
block.
“It’s best that way. Nobody comes to watch films any more,” he said.
“The whole place stinks. Some nights there’s just me in the lobby,
looking like a ghost in a haunted building.”
The Star, in Dhaka’s old quarter, a stone’s throw from the Buriganga
River, was built in 1947 after the Indian subcontinent was
partitioned.
The 879-seat theatre was among the first in impoverished Bangladesh to
have air-conditioning and was a popular hangout for Dhaka’s rich and
famous.
Back then, the city’s population was only half a million but the
cinema hall had no trouble attracting the crowds.
“Every night at the Star was a great spectacle back in its heyday,”
said Chowdhury, who started his job in 1971 soon after Bangladesh
gained independence.
“It was brimming with crowds weeks after a film’s opening night.”
Now Dhaka is home to some 12 million people, and that figure grows
every day with new buildings thrown up to accommodate the recent
arrivals. But the interest in home-grown films is waning.
The Star’s fate follows that of hundreds of cinemas throughout the
country that have been bulldozed to make way for residential buildings
and shopping malls.
The Bangladesh Cinema Hall Owners Association (BCHOA) says there are
now 730 theatres throughout the country compared to about double that
number four years ago.
An increase in violent scenes and dirty dancing forced the country’s
interim army-backed authorities to clamp down on film content two
years ago.
As well as ordering a military-led taskforce to seek out studios
responsible for the “immoral” films and ban them from the industry,
the government also launched a talent hunt earlier this year for a new
breed of “clean” actors.
But BCHOA secretary Mia Alauddin says the results of those efforts
will come too late for buildings like the Star.
He says Dhaka’s emerging middle class is more interested in watching
Hindi films from across the Indian border or pirated copies of western
new releases, freely available in the city for about a dollar a piece.
“We have our own film industry here – we call it Dhaliwood – but
Bollywood has emerged as the hub of the subcontinent’s film business
in the past decade and Dhaka’s has declined steeply,” he says.