The First Post August 21, 2006
Make films not war
William Langley watches a Bollywood blockbuster in Pakistan, the first to be screened there for 40 years
With every moth-eaten seat filled, Lahore's Empire cinema last week premiered what may be the first film to forestall a nuclear war.
Up on screen - and barely visible through the heat haze - was Taj Mahal, the most expensive Bollywood movie ever made, and the first to be released in Pakistan for 41 years.
To facilitate the screening, Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf had to sign a special exemption to a 1965 law banning Indian cultural imports. Three days later, in Islamabad, the General tootled off to a movie house to watch it himself.
What he saw was an authentically bling-laden, song-and-dance-heavy Bollywood spectacular based on the famous romance between the Moghul emperor Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, in whose honour was built the eponymous Taj.
The reviews were decidedly mixed (in India, despite its big-name cast, the film bombed) but Taj Mahal's artistic merits weren't really the point. In both countries its release was hailed as a significant rapprochement between two nuclear-armed rivals who have fought three wars since the 1947 division of the subcontinent.
In this time, while Bollywood has boomed, Pakistan's own once-vibrant movie industry has collapsed. Of the 1,400 cinemas in the country in the mid-1980s only around 150 remain. The appetite for Indian films is largely met by the smuggling of bootleg DVDs which movie fans watch at home. In Lahore, where there were once 65 cinemas, just 12 are left; of these only the Empire was considered salubrious enough for the screening of Taj Mahal.
The film's director, Akbar Khan, and a host of its stars turned up for the premiere. "This is a great day for relations between our two countries," declared Pakistan's minister of culture Ghazi Jamal.
Unfortunately, not everyone was on message. The night after the premiere, the director's actor-brother, Feroz Khan, turned up conspicuously drunk, at a Lahore television station where he began by warning the presenter, "I'll bash you up," and went on to say Pakistan's Muslims were primarily interested in murdering each other.
"Insult to the nation!" "Throw him out!" screamed the next day's headlines. Best not dismantle the fall-out shelters just yet.