he Odeon Cinema’s creaky, ripped red vinyl seats are mostly empty except for a couple of back rows where a dozen men sit slouched, their eyes half-open, legs slung over the seats in front of them. Along the hall’s bubble-gum pink walls, rows of fans barely move the hot, dank air. The Odeon’s loudspeakers crackle like an old radio.
The feature on this recent evening is a Lollywood feature called “Majajan,” a love story. The barely breathing, Lahore-based Pakistan film industry produces less than a dozen movies each year, which explains why every day, three times a day for the last three years, the only movie screened at the Odeon has been “Majajan.”
Welcome to Lollywood, or what’s left of it. Reporting for the LA Times, Alex Rodriguez tells us how it wasn’t always this way. Back in the 1960s and ‘70s, Lahore buzzed with movie shoots, red-carpet premieres and box-office hits. The Pakistan film industry has always been based here, and though it didn’t have the girth or dazzle of Bollywood, Lollywood thrived in a country staking out an identity distinct from its neighbor, India.
Piracy: Today, Pakistani cinema has all but vanished, a victim of the VCR, cable television and finally DVD piracy. In 1985, 1,100 movie houses operated in Pakistan; today, only 120 are in business. The few directors, producers and cinema owners often rely on second jobs to make ends meet.
Reviving the industry necessitates junking what’s left of Pakistani cinema and starting from scratch, says Jahanzaib Baig, a cinema owner pushing for a revival of film in Pakistan. Baig has been lobbying the government to clamp down on DVD piracy, a scourge that keeps people from leaving their living rooms to head to cinemas. “We have hit rock bottom,” says Baig. “We can only go up. Whatever we had before is not only destroyed but is obsolete in terms of technology and skills. So we’re setting the foundation for a new film industry in Pakistan.”
Survivor: Sangeeta, a Lollywood mega-star during the 1970s and one of the few survivors still directing homegrown films, says a revival of the industry can happen only if the government lends a hand.
“We need government support,” says Sangeeta, now 52. “We need new cameras, new studios. Right now, producers aren’t investing because the equipment isn’t good.”
The advent of cable television and VCRs drew Pakistanis away from cinemas, but it was President Zia ul-Haq’s religion-based policies that sped the industry’s demise. Many cinemas were shut down, the rest were heavily taxed. New laws that required producers to have college degrees thinned the ranks of moviemakers. As Lollywood’s top-shelf creative talent dropped out of the flagging industry, scripts got worse and Pakistanis stopped going to movies. Bollywood filled the void; Indian movies flooded video stores and clogged cable channels. Pakistani filmmakers who stayed in the industry found themselves hamstrung by dwindling budgets.
“In India, they spend $12 million on a movie, and we can spend maybe about $120,000,” says Pakistani film producer Jamshed Zafar, who sidelines as an exporter of South Asian spices. “How can we compete?”
One of the only directors still making movies, Syed Noor, has established a film school in Lahore to help seed a new generation of filmmakers. But most directors and producers gave up long ago.
