A Bangladeshi film about a love affair set in the country’s bloody 1971 liberation struggle against Pakistan has stirred up heated debate, prompting the distributor to pull it from cinemas.
Meherjaan: A Story of War and Love, which features some of South Asia’s biggest stars including Victor Banerjee and Jaya Bachchan, wife of Indian movie legend Amitabh Bachchan, was released in January to critical acclaim.
But the plot, charting a romance between a local girl and a Pakistani soldier, has hit a raw nerve in Bangladesh, where a new war crimes tribunal has just begun prosecuting suspected collaborators.
“I fought in the liberation war but after we released this film, my fellow freedom fighters called me a collaborator and traitor,” the owner of the film’s distribution company, Habibur Rahman Khan, said.
“We’ve stopped distributing the film because critics said it degraded the sufferings of the Bangladeshi women raped in the war,” he said. In the film, Meherjaan, a Bangladeshi girl, falls in love with a Pakistani soldier who gets court-martialled for refusing to participate in war crimes and atrocities.
A barrage of criticism in the Bangladeshi press and on the Internet said the film’s romantic storyline undermined the suffering of the estimated 200,000 Bangladeshi women raped by Pakistani forces during the war.
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Arnold plans to return as Terminator?
Los Angeles: Action star Arnold Schwarzenegger is reportedly making his acting comeback with a role in the fifth edition of Terminator.
The 63-year-old actor, who ended his term as the California governor in January, shot to fame with James Cameron’s classic Terminator and appeared in sequels Judgment Day and Rise of the Machines, Deadline reported.
Justin Lin, who had directed the last three editions of Fast and the Furious, franchise is speculated to be pairing with screen writer Chris Morgan to direct the fifth movie in the series.
Schwarzenegger did a cameo in The Expendables and had a small part to play in Terminator: Salvation which was not well received by both the audience as well as the critics.
—PTI