During a recent interview with Haroon Rashid of BBC Asian Network, Hareem Farooq spoke up about the Pakistani film industry and how the cinema-going culture is declining.
When asked about whether it’s okay to say ‘support local cinema’ even when folks say a film is terrible, she replied, “I’d say that’s true. You need to own everything right now.”
She went on to say, “Bollywood, Hollywood, Tamilwood, they’re centuries old, while Pakistani cinema is probably just six years old. We talk about making something out of our country, and we want to take our cinema abroad. We want to tell people that what you get to see in the news is not Pakistan or the one you get to hear about from people who don’t even know what Pakistan is, right? You need to tell people that this is Pakistan; it is beautiful, it has colours, it has talent, it has everything.”
“So, even if there is a bad film, you need to understand and our audiences need to understand, that we don’t have the technicians, the writers, or even the actors for films. Everyone is learning and the only reason why people are doing films is passion and it’s just purely passion, trust me on this.”
We understand whta Hareem Farooq is saying that Pakistan industry is early phase, but considering the time that has passed and the number of films that has been produced should we still promote the mediocre films? Also, there will be no motivation for filmmakers to do better if we keep supporting whatever is served. They won’t come out of their comfort zones to make super hits.
We want to support our local industry. But if in the past few years we get the same kind of films with the exact same problems time and time again, ‘support local cinema’ won’t work anymore.
