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Curtains closing on Bangladesh's cinemas
2008-12-19
DHAKA (AFP) - For 37 years, Taraknath Chowdhury has spent every day sitting behind a booth in a corner of one of the Bangladeshi capital's most famous cinemas. This month, however, the 59-year-old will end his career when the three-storey Star Cinema closes to make way for a high-rise apartment block. "It's best that way. Nobody comes to watch films any more," he said. "The whole place stinks. Some nights there's just me in the lobby, looking like a ghost in a haunted building." The Star, in Dhaka's old quarter, a stone's throw from the Buriganga River, was built in 1947 after the Indian subcontinent was partitioned. The 879-seat theatre was among the first in impoverished Bangladesh to have air-conditioning and was a popular hangout for Dhaka's rich and famous. Back then, the city's population was only half a million but the cinema hall had no trouble attracting the crowds. "Every night at the Star was a great spectacle back in its heyday,"said Chowdhury, who started his job in 1971 soon after Bangladesh gained independence from Pakistan. "It was brimming with crowds weeks after a film's opening night." Now Dhaka is home to some 12 million people, and that figure grows every day with new buildings thrown up to accommodate the recent arrivals. But the interest in home-grown films is waning. The Star's fate follows that of hundreds of cinemas throughout the country that have been bulldozed to make way for residential buildings and shopping malls. The Bangladesh Cinema Hall Owners Association (BCHOA) says there are now 730 theatres throughout the country compared to about double that number four years ago. An increase in violent scenes and dirty dancing forced the country's interim army-backed authorities to clamp down on film content two years ago. As well as ordering a military-led taskforce to seek out studios responsible for the "immoral" films and ban them from the industry, the government also launched a talent hunt earlier this year for a new breed of "clean" actors. But BCHOA secretary Mia Alauddin says the results of those efforts will come too late for buildings like the Star. He says Dhaka's emerging middle class is more interested in watching Hindi films from across the Indian border or pirated copies of western new releases, freely available in the city for about a dollar a piece. "We have our own film industry here -- we call it Dhaliwood -- but Bollywood has emerged as the hub of the subcontinent's film business in the past decade and Dhaka's has declined steeply," he says. A government ban on imported films means cinemas are becoming increasingly empty. To add to the industry's woes, spiralling land prices in Dhaka -- which have risen 100-fold in the past 30 years -- means urban movie theatres in the city centre are among the most sought-after real estate, Indeed, owner of the Star, Iftekharul Alam, says he thought long and hard about selling his "prized possession," purchased from an Indian owner in 1959, before resigning it to the same destiny as 10 other theatres he once owned. With the Star sold, he is left with just three, and says he does not know how long he will hold onto them. "It took months for me to finally give in and sell the Star. In the end the offer was too good. Although it was a painful decision, I could not resist," he said. "The cinema business is no longer a viable one. I have been losing money for years and there is no silver lining on the horizon." He blames declining standards of films for the slow death of Dhaka's cinema business. "Anyone with a bit of cash to throw around can make a film but the quality is not good so people have simply stopped coming. We used to have great family storylines but not any more," he says. Across the road from the Star stands the eight-storey Moon shopping mall, until recently, the site of the Star's main rival, the 70-year-old Moon Cinema Hall. As Star ticket seller Taraknath Chowdhury prepares to close his counter for good, he says he hopes those who will occupy the land where his old workplace has stood for decades do not forget the vibrant theatre culture of his city. "Already the developers who have bought the Star have put up a big sign advertising the high-rise apartment block they plan to build. They're calling it Babuli Star City," he said.
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