The debate is raging on. These days the decline of the Pakistan film industry is being fiercely discussed. Suddenly film actor Ajab Gul has lots to speak about, as if he’s done something remarkable in the past that makes him an expert on the subject. Resham, Sangeeta and some others (including a former bureaucrat with predetermined ideas) have too chipped in with their opinions. The prominent of the lot is director Syed Noor, who blames everything on India and the Indian film industry, and believes if he has the financial backing he can make better films. You can only shake your head in utter disbelief. It’s confounding that a majority of our film actors and makers are India-phobic? So let’s take that country out of the equation and take into account an industry called Hollywood.

Hollywood makes obscenely expensive films. Its actors are super rich. Now in the same industry, on a regular basis, a certain group of people makes independent films, which are made on a shoe-string budget and not always with new faces as lead characters. Sometimes known stars become a part of ‘indie’ projects as well. The normal budget of a Hollywood films stretches to millions of dollars. In the same industry a film like The Blair Witch Project is made at the expense of no more than $20,000. Recently a comparatively low-budget film titled Crazy Heart won the best actor Oscar for Jeff Bridges.

The point is it’s the idea, the concept or the story that counts first. The question of finances is a later issue. Do Pakistani film directors have a story to tell? Can they tell a story, let’s say, the way their low-budget Hollywood counterparts do? The answer is, no. So many of them just don’t seem to have it. Reason: many don’t know that film-making is an ‘art’ form. When a Nobel laureate says the best creative work of the 20th century has gone into film-making, he means the work of the likes of Federico Fellini, Martin Scorsese, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen and Satyajit Ray. Period.