Bollywood releases its first film in Bangladesh

Pathaan, a spy thriller in which he stars “King of Bollywood”, Shah Rukh Khan on Friday became the first Indian film to be released in Bangladesh in nearly a decade, to the excitement of fans who have relied on piracy and the underground market.

“Today is really a big day for me because I am a big fan of Shah Rukh Khan. This is the first time I have seen him movie in the cinema,” said Sayem Sami, a member of a group of fans who packed one of the country’s 41 theaters that screened the spy thriller starring Khan and Deepika Padukone.

The release created huge anticipation in Bangladesh, with endless queues outside cinemas, many of which were sold out.

The productions of the film industry based in the Indian city of Bombay were banned almost with the independence of Bangladesh, in 1971, as a measure to protect local cinema.

The last time the country witnessed the premiere of the film of the huge film industry in India was in 2015, when the government temporarily lifted the ban on films from the neighboring country.

Wanted is also played by an actor Indian Salman Khan, he was nominated for the honor, but the government had to quickly withdraw it after protests by local actors and directors, who criticized Indian films as destroying the local industry.

Last month, the government approved a license to import films from the Indian subcontinent under the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) agreement. This decision caused different reactions among the stakeholders of the domestic film industry.

“We look at it positively, because we don’t have enough content here. Ours industry has been destroyed and all the big directors have their hands crossed,” the businessman told EFE Iftekhar Uddin Nawshad, the owner of a famous cinema in Dhaka.

“We found no benefit in protection film industry local (…) The film industry is in a deep black hole,” he added.

According to Nawshad, Bangladesh once had about 1,500 cinemas, of which barely a hundred are still operational.

However, a local film director Gias Uddin Selim He told EFE that many theaters had already started refusing to screen Bangladeshi films after the announcement of the screening of Pathaan and called for the establishment of a quota of Indian films that can be shown in a year.

“If Indian films take over all the theatres, there is no doubt that they will destroy our industry cinematic local. This will put us in an unequal competition,” he lamented.

He Government of Bangladesh it initially allowed the import of a maximum of 10 South Asian films in the first year in exchange for the export of an equal number of films under the SAFTA agreement.