Filmmakers in Muslim-majority Bangladesh who fail to heed government calls to ”cleanse obscenity” from the nation’s film industry will face up to three years in jail, an official warned on Tuesday.
Abu Abdullah, vice-chairperson of the Bangladesh Film Censor Board, said a law placed before Parliament earlier this month would plug holes in existing legislation and leave filmmakers facing prison sentences of between one and three years.
The Censorship of Films (Amendment) Bill 2005 aims to ”get tough on a section of filmmakers who have introduced obscenity to make more profits”, Abdullah told Agence France Presse.
Under the existing law, enacted in 1963, the maximum punishment for an obscene or pornographic film is three-months. Loopholes, however, have allowed filmmakers to evade jail and for banned films to be screened nationwide.
The government has banned more than 60 films and shut down more than 40 theatres in the past 15 months as part of its drive to clean up the country’s movie industry, which is popularly known as ”Dhaliwood”.
Inspectors seized films containing bathing scenes, rapes and other sexually explicit clips sometimes taken from foreign films and edited into Bangladeshi-made films.
Films containing scenes in which characters dance close together have also been seized, the censor board said.
Information Minister Shamsul Islam has warned that the films are corrupting the nation’s youth.
”Social degradation will increase unless we cleanse obscenity from the film industry,” he told Parliament earlier.
The Dhaka-based Bengali film industry churns out some 100 low-budget movies a year at an average cost of about 6,5-million taka ($100 000) each for the country’s 1 000-plus cinemas.
Under pressure from the government, the industry last week temporarily expelled three artists from the Film Actors’ Association. One of the actors, Danny Raj, was expelled for repeatedly appearing in rape scenes, the Bengali-language Daily Manabjamin said. – AFP
