Bangladesh has lifted a four-decade ban on Indian films in a bid to boost attendance at cinemas, a government minister said on Saturday, drawing loud complaints from local actors and directors.
Films produced by India’s huge Bollywood entertainment industry have been banned from Bangladesh’s cinemas since 1972, a year after the country’s independence, to protect the local movie industry.
“We lifted the ban to boost the cinema industry,” Bangladesh Commerce Minister Faruk Khan said.
Cinema hall owners, who have been clamoring to be allowed to show Indian films, said they expected to start showing Indian films shortly.
Kazi Firoz Rashid, president of Bangladesh Cinema Hall Owners Association, said the government’s decision was “the best thing to have happened” to the country’s cinemas.
The number of cinema theaters has slid to 600 this year from 1,600 in 2000 in the country with Bangladeshi films and soft-porn English-language films shown in movie houses failing to draw viewers.
“Film enthusiasts can easily see good Indian films on cable television so why should we stop Indian films being screened in our cinemas?” Rashid said.
“By contrast, the standards, scripts and production of Bangladeshi films are so stale and poor they have trouble winning hearts or making enough money,” he said.
Pirated DVD copies of Bollywood movies circulate widely in Bangladesh in the absence of them being shown in cinemas and the films are hugely popular.
The lifting of the ban comes amid warming relations between India and Bangladesh after ties worsened between the neighbors when an Islamist-allied government was in power in Dhaka from 2001 to 2006.
“The new order scraps the ban and allows screening of Indian and other South Asian films in local cinemas provided they have English subtitles,” the government’s Film Censor Board chief Surat Kumar Sarker said.
However, not everyone supports the move.
“Indian films will completely destroy our film industry and our culture. At least 25,000 people will be jobless,” said Masum Parvez Rubel, a leading star and a co-coordinator of a newly created front against Indian films.
“We have appealed to the commerce minister and the authorities to reverse the decision. Otherwise, we’ll protest until the last drop of blood,” he said.
India’s prolific film industry churns out about 1,000 new releases a year.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might