Indian Cinema in the Middle East-Gulf
Let me start as an Author here on PFC, with subjects that I normally do not write about 
My intention to write this article on PFC was to make aware of the huge potential that this region has – especially to the new-age cinema makers.
It all started from one article that I had read from the mid 50’s (fortunately I had typed the excerpts many years back and producing them here ), when A R Kardar had visited the Middle East countries like Egypt, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt & Sudan. The area of 2.4 million sq miles and population of 81 million (then).
Kardar had given lots of figures on the cinema halls built in those days ( for example Egypt had 360 cinema halls by 1954, etc ). The figures are not relevant today, since most of them are vanishing and multiplexes are taking their place.
But we need to take note that multiplexes are in abundance, especially in the last decade and there are these huge shopping centres which have N number of halls/theatres for movies.
Coming back to Kardar’s observations. He had said that many Indian movies there did not do well because of poor picturization values, bad stories, music and lack of action. The Arabs precisely want these factors in Hindi Movies ( You will be surprised to see the number of Arabs in cinema halls these days ). Kardar gave a fantastic report of the movie “Aan” ( theatre-wise collection reports were given – Aan ran in 12 halls in Egypt alone ). Aan had collected 45573 E pounds, which was 6 lakh rupees. Unfortunately due to dire need of money, Mehboob had already sold the international rights to Mr V V Puri at Rs 1,50,000 !! It went on to collect another 12 lakhs from the other Middle Eastern countries and another 12 lakh from Japan, Malay, Singapore, Fiji, Africas, South America, Madagascar, mauritius, Indonesia, Indo-China and Siam.
Kardar had made very important points ( which I think many of them are still valid ) :
1) No mythological or idol worship(extensive) scenes.
2) Simple rhythmic music, preferably fast action with good story.
3) Social themes or hindu life or too much emphasis on democracy, socialistic, communistic themes, ridiculing Arabs, is not welcome.
4) Muslim socials (where are they now ? )adventure dramas, Ruritanian subjects, Arab costume/fantasies are a hit
5) Good Arabic sub-titles, particularly in colloquial Arabic spoken throughout the ME
6) Inviting goodwill missions from these countries to India
7) Annual Film Festival, jointly held.
Countries like Saudi Arabia ( “one” country with a population of 28 million ) would not show movies of our kind. But still DVD’s ( especially if some kind of online downloads are available ) can be a huge market there. But the Hindi DVD’s in the Middle East cost from 500 to 1500 INR ! so clearly some organization/government must try and bring some delegation to these countries and draft a proper movie format and cut the DVD’s according to it and then sell at the Indian rates. It would be a huge success – mark my words.
There are more than 100 movies per year, which are not released in the Middle East – whatever the reason ( small budgets, producers not taking interest, thinking no market, etc etc )
Wake up Indian producers !! Make some strategies for these countries. You have the Arabs and the huge expat population waiting to Lapp up our movies. Ahhh and yesss…you will have me , most of the times in FDFS (first day first shows) !!
Tags: Aan, ARKardar, Cinema, Gulf, Indian, mehboob, MiddleEast
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
welcome aboard!
your write-up on the cinema in middle-east was really interesting. i hope film distributors and other concerned people take some cues from it and tap the potential
Different starting point. Hope to read more stuff from you. Welcome aboard..
kcp- once again a warm welcome to you.And yes your article does give food for thought for a lot of people who could take some necessary mileage.
I am working in Riyadh(Saudi Arabia).Here since there are no cinema halls we all have to depend on bad quality dvds or wait for the original dvd to come out(which by the way takes a looong time to reach here).But yes the arabs like hindi movies and people from countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh do watch a lot of them.But clearly they have their favourites.A film featuring Shahrukh,Aamir or Salman will definitely sell here more than say Luck by Chance or Dev D.Another thing is that most of the people staying here still like(and this is sad…) the 80’s and early 90’s type film.In fact I have a lot of Indian and Pakistani friends staying here for a long time who have’nt heard about films like Dil Chahta Hai,Page 3 r Black Friday!!!But egypt also has a film industry(though the quality of films cannot be compared with ours) and since their language is arabic it is very popular here.
Your article reminds me of a question I had just recently, does Dubai ever host a film festival? and a related question, does Dubai have censorship policies that would impose restrictions on a film festival?
Hello Virginia :
www.dubaifilmfest.com
www.meiff.com
Dubai is as open a country as anywhere, except all general-illegal things.
KCP thanks so much for really useful and interesting information!!