PESHAWAR, Aug 12: The police on Tuesday again removed film posters displaying women’s pictures from main roads of the city in its so-called anti-obscenity campaign.

The drive was taken up again on Tuesday morning with posters being removed from walls alongside the Sunehri Mosque, Sher Shah Suri and Grand Trunk roads.

A senior police official told Dawn that they had been strictly ordered to continue with the campaign for removal of film posters.

Manager of the Sabrina and Aeena cinemas Saleh Mohammad complained that the film business had been ruined since the beginning of the campaign.

Describing the situation faced by cinemas as devastating, he said that under instructions from the local administration, cinema owners could not display pictures of women on their billboards, instead they had to depict just an outline of their figures.

After undergoing such a process, he said the billboard of a Pushto film titled “Khan Khela” showed just the hollow contours of women along with a lion. “Who will come to the cinema to see a film about lions?” he asked, adding that the general public found billboards devoid of women’s pictures unattractive.

Colloquial titles are customary for English films being displayed here like the billboard of an English movie, titled “Hasina 302,” displaying only a black outline of a woman riding a horse. Mr Saleh said that it was impossible to attract cinema- goers with such display posters.

Saleh Mohammad said that the cinema owners had recently pasted some coloured posters of a film showing only the face of a woman on walls of selected areas in the city, adding that someone had complained to the police, who had not only removed these posters but had warned them (cinema owners) to refrain from doing so in the future.

He said that a recently-released Pushto film titled Shahinshah Da Zamani would not be able to retrieve more than a million rupees in the prevailing circumstances, adding that the film had incurred a cost of over Rs3.2 million.

Expressing pessimism about the future of the Pushto film industry, Mr Saleh said nobody would make movies in such circumstances.