Salvaging Bangla cinema

Over the years the quality of Bangla cinema has gone down dramatically. A Bangla film worth watching by parents and their children together in a theatre has become a rarity. To be precise, lack of quality script, dialogue, music composition, editing and finally lack of quality acting by actors and actresses have all contributed to the milieu of present Bangla cinema. Lately we have seen some Indian Hindi movies releasing in our theatres. Our cultural activists are protesting the move. They claim that it will badly impact the local film industry. We all agree, but is it an explanation enough to ban foreign movies?

 The answer is no. It is not the proper solution to develop our films. It has become imperative that we need to introduce modern technology, better script, powerful acting and sound direction etc., in our films so that we can compete with others and draw our people to the movie halls. If we look at the recent super-hit Indian Hindi film "PK", we immediately discover that the film was a success because of its script, direction and the quality of acting, particularly by Amir Khan.

This is being cited as an example and this scribe is not saying that we shall have to try and make a movie like that. Over the last couple of decades, we have been experiencing repetition of similar scripts in almost all movies, either it is a triangular love story or it is about the conflict between the higher and the lower classes. Some of our directors tried their best to change this, but those were not commercially successful. In this respect, we would like to appreciate Ananta Jalil for the way he is trying to bring a new dimension to our commercial cinema. But due to lack of quality script and actors and actresses, Jalil himself acted in those films, which was hardly acceptable. People would appreciate if he restricts himself to financing and making films only.

It appears that most of our commercial films are being made for the uneducated people, but our directors should remember that there is a huge youth community in our country who can be drawn to the theatres if some good movies are produced. If we look at our next door film industry, we will see that it has improved a lot in making commercial movies. Their film industry is also famous for making art-films. Some of our producers are trying to copy the Tamil films of India. I do not think, this is bad, because Mumbai film industry is also doing the same. But the thing that our producers should remember is the copyright law.

We all are concerned that piracy is a major problem for our film industry. To eradicate this problem we need to enforce the law and make movies on our own so that the movie lovers could enjoy the films at a cheaper price. A joint effort of our government, cultural activists and financiers is required to salvage our sinking film industry.

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