Does Size Matter in Pakistan?

So cynically begins the trailer of Waar, the most exp - ensive (with a controverted budget of $2 million), the most slick and the most eagerly anticipated film in the history of Pakista ni cinema. On the first day of the release of the trailer on YouTube, Waar had over 1.5 lakh hits (it has raked in some 3.5 lakh more in the fortnight since) and made it to the website’s top five videos. Today, the film is widely slated as the one that will singlehandedly revive the terminally ill Pakistani film industry. No mean feat for an incomplete film with a top-secret storyline; by a team comprising a rookie director, producer and scriptwriter; in a country that can’t even remember its glorious cinematic past. And, to top it all, more than half of the film is in English, a language not spoken by vast swathes of Pakistan.

So why the fuss? “Waar is an important film because it is a big-budget, mainstream feature film with mainstream stars dealing with an import - ant topic: counter-terrorism,” says veteran ad film maker Saquib Malik, who specialises in equally glossy, big-budget productions. “If it succeeds, it will pave the way for other people from non-filmi backgrounds who are interested in making films.”

There weren’t too many of those in Pakistan till recently. The film industry sank into a tailspin in the 1980s and filmmaking remained the preserve of the ‘filmy lot’. But the mushroom growth of TV channels in the past decade — the country now boasts of 80- plus channels — succeeded in pulling a lot of educated young people from middleand upper middle-income families towards the media industry. The training institutes and university-designed courses came later; the first batches at the TV networks learned to write, shoot and edit on the job. For the first few years, these wannabe ‘filmmakers’ aspired to documentaries alone, pre fer ably those that’d find resonance with a global audience. (Taliban, anyone? Honour kill - ings? Sex workers? Hijras?)

And then in 2007 came Pakistan’s first “unconventional masala film” (as Malik calls it) Khuda Kay Liye, directed by TV veteran Shoaib Mansoor. But while Mansoor’s name pulled back to the theatres many people who’d abandoned cinema in protest against the buxom belles and vehshi gujjars populating every film, his cinematic take on religious extremism won as many laurels as brickbats. The issue was pertinent and relevant; the film ended up being preachy and boring. Next came Ramchand Pakistani, a gut-wrenching story about an eight-year-old boy who inadvertently crosses the Indo- Pak border. But even in the hands of the talented TV director Mehreen Jabbar, the ‘film’ collapsed into a longwinded docu-drama. Even though Mansoor’s 2011 offering Bol did remarkably well at the box office, the mix of issues highlighted by the film — patricide, religious intolerance, societal hypocrisy and lack of family planning — proved too heady for many.

The heady issues in Bol had the cultural critics in Pakistan conclude that their directors were more autistic than auteurs

The cultural critics wrung their hands in despair and concluded that Pakistani directors were more autistic than auteurs. But aspiring filmmakers saw something else: these films had an audience willing to see something other than the rain-drenched sequences. And thanks to digital technology, filmmaking was now cheaper than ever before. So came a blaze of new films and new directors: Hammad Khan’s Slackistan, Bilal Lashari’s Waar, Sham - oon Abbasi’s Gidh, Hamza Ali Abbasi’s Mudhouse and the Golden Doll, Kaptaan and Tamanna. And the key difference between then and now is that of ambition.

The 2011 release Slackistan was about the elite youth of Islamabad — a typical slacker film — has no deep and profound thought to communicate. Gidh is ostensibly about how the media manipulates news but Abbasi is very clear on why he made the film. “Nobody wants to see fat women dancing in the fields anymore,” he says in a snide reference to the typical Lollywood potboiler, adding, “Our films are about contemporary life, in a language and an idiom we speak in. At the end of the day, it’s entertainment.”