Jakarta Globe – Karachi, Pakistan. Dark and smoky, the cinema hall reeks of hashish. An overly made-up woman on screen in provocatively figure-hugging clothes dances suggestively to the beat of loud music. The audience, all men, cheer and whistle. The music stops, the scenes get racier and sexually titillating. The crowd abandons all caution. The whistles turn to grunts and growls, chairs begin to bang.
A porn film show is under way right under the nose of the religious-political parties, the Taliban, and the government, at a cinema theater in Peshawar, the capital city of the most conservative province of Pakistan: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Peshawar in particular, continue to reel from bomb attacks on girls’ schools and even shrines. Shops selling CDs, and Internet cafes have been sporadically attacked. Billboards showing women have been defaced or pulled down. Yet cinemas showing porn continue to flourish.
“Every show in those cinemas is house-full,” says Lala Fida Mohammad Khan, former producer of films in the local language Pashto, and who now runs a cinema in the garrison city Rawalpindi next to the capital, Islamabad.
“Everyone knows what fare each cinema churns out, everyone is involved. Daily three shows are run and on Sundays there is a morning matinee as well. On the auspicious Eid days, there are usually five shows so people can come right after the congregation.”
The hundreds of thousands of rupees in bribes or “monthlies” that cinema owners pay as protection money ensures their business continues uninterrupted, says Khan.
The Shama cinema in Peshawar is owned by the Bilour family, some of whose members are in the Awami National Party that holds a majority in the province. “They had three cinemas,” says Khan. “One was attacked several years back so two of these have been turned into shopping plazas, and the one that remains shows porn films.”
There are just nine cinemas left in Peshawar. Of these, says Aijaz Gul, a well-known film critic, only one run by the Pakistan Air Force “avoids” porn.
Since the Taliban started wielding power in the province, says Khan, two cinemas have been attacked. A number of cinema hall owners were kidnapped for ransom.
“They paid huge sums and got themselves freed but have not left their occupation.”
Khan says he stopped making films because “no one wants to watch clean, decent films; these don’t sell any more.”
Khan remembers the time in Peshawar some two decades ago when “tickets would be sold out days and weeks in advance” and when cinema-goers included women. “Now, with the kind of trash shown in cinemas, even if it is not porn, there is no question of women venturing into cinema houses in Peshawar,” he said.
Only the lifting of the ban on exhibiting Indian films in 2006 gave Pakistan cinema halls a new lease on life.
Just a little over 200 cinema halls are left, down from 700 in 1977. The Pakistan film industry produced just 20 films last year, of which five were in the national Urdu language, seven in Punjabi and eight in Pashto.
One Response
I would not want to be within 50 miles of one of those theaters when the Taliban rolls into town because they caught wind of a porn movie playing.