LONDON, Sept 23: Pakistani film actress Meera on Friday shrugged off the outcry over a kissing scene she did for an Indian film. “Who cares?” she said on the sidelines of an Asian film festival. “You see Julia Roberts, Sharon Stone and Angelina Jolie kissing on screen and they are all great actresses. I have to compete with all actresses and I have to perform according to the script.

“In Pakistan, girls have very limited thinking. I have moved internationally into India and my destiny is Hollywood.”

Meera was invited to the festival by Indian director Irfan Ajeeb to represent Pakistan.

Meera was the first Pakistani actress to star in an Indian film after the recent thaw in relations between the two countries, but a kissing scene caused uproar back home, with some religious groups issuing death threats.

“The hardliners in Pakistan were after her blood,” said Ajeeb. “I think it’s brave of an actress to go over to India and do these daring roles. Religion, politics and culture always come into it in South Asia.”

The film festival kicked off on Friday with a controversial Indian movie that has been blocked by the courts back home.

The 11th annual Bite the Mango film festival in the northern English city of Bradford is out to highlight the problems faced by filmmakers and actors in South Asia’s prolific cinema industry, which is seen as conservative and politicized.

The opening movie will be “Black Friday”, directed by 33-year-old Anurag Kashyap, which centres around the 1993 bomb attacks across Mumbai that killed more than 250 people.

An Indian court has blocked its theatre release while a legal case is ongoing, but Kashyap believes there is a wider problem of general unease about hard-hitting, factual films dealing with controversial subjects.—Reuters