Mumbai film festival has cancelled screenings of a classic Pakistani film after protesters filed a police complaint and threatened to disrupt screenings. Festival organisers cited only “the current situation” as the reason for the cancellations.
The NGO Sangharsh filed a complaint to police against the festival, arguing that any screening of the 1959 film The Day Shall Dawn (Jago Hua Savera) was likely to provoke outrage and threatened to “stall the screening” of the film if it was not cancelled.
Tensions have been high since 17 Indian soldiers were killed by militants in an attack on an army camp near the disputed border with Pakistan in September. India accused Pakistan of involvement and described its neighbour as “a terrorist state”. India then said it had launched “surgical strikes” on Pakistan-based terrorists in retaliation.
Following the attack, the Indian Motion Picture Producers Association (IMPPA) banned Pakistani actors from working in Indian films “until normalcy returns”. The president of the organisation, TP Aggarwal, went further and suggested the ban would be permanent, saying, “No Pakistani will be hired by [the IMPPA’s] producer members, for ever”.
The far right political party Maharashtra Navnirman Chitrapat Karmachari Sena said all Pakistani actors had now left India.
“Today not a single Pakistani artist is in the country,” party president Amey Khopkar was reported as saying by the Indian Express. “Whether they have gone back to Pakistan or Dubai, what matters is they are not in India. Our protests are not yet over.
“The day Pakistan stops terrorist attacks, only then will we extend our hand of friendship. After the attacks, none of these Pakistani actors condemned it. We are not protesting against art and cinema, we are protesting against Pakistani actors.”
The Day Shall Dawn depicts life in a fishing village in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and is considered the country’s first example of a neorealist film. It was restored in 2010 and screened at Cannes this year.
