Bangladesh’s film industryI
Under a tree in the studios of Bangladesh’s struggling
film industry, women extras in the shadows of
glamour wait for work. They tell Sophie Hemery and
Alice McCool their stories.Dhally wood
dreams
‘M
y mother’s love for acting
flowed from her blood into
my own,’ says Bulu Bari,
an extra in Dhallywood, Bangladesh’s
Dhaka-based film industry. ‘I remember
being five years old, going to rehearsals
with her in a rickshaw.’
Petite and now elderly, Bulu is dressed
in a vibrant orange, green and purple sari
and walks with slow, deliberate steps. A
Dhallywood regular since childhood,
she is greeted by almost everyone at the
Bangladesh Film Development Corpo-
ration, commonly known as FDC. Bulu
travels here most days, on a bus which
takes several hours each way. Here, extras
like her sit beneath the large central tree,
chatting together while they wait for
work. Mainly women, many have been
working in the industry their whole lives.
Much like Dhallywood films them-
selves, the Bangladeshi film industry has
had a melodramatic past. When Bulu’s
mother – Bilkis Bari – appeared in the
first full-length Bengali ‘talkie’ in 1956,
The Face and the Mask, Bangladesh wasthen East Pakistan. ‘The Bengali Muslim
middle class considered foreign films
to be a threat to Bengali culture,’ says
Joyshri Bithi, author of a book about
Dhallywood extras. ‘In 1957 the outcome
was the formation of the then East Paki-
stan Film Development Corporation here
in Dhaka.’
After Bangladesh’s independence in
1971, cinemas were banned from screen-
ing Indian films. The local industry flour-
ished and produced an array of successful
films throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Around 100 films a year were made in the
1990s, too. Bithi describes these decades
as ‘a golden era for Dhallywood, com-
mercially and critically’.
But with the 2000s came a sharp
decline and last year Dhallywood pro-
duced just 36 films, which Bithi says
were ‘all low quality’. Increased access to
foreign films on the internet is the main
reason, although some in the industry
claim it is also due to a growing trend of
film productions being used as vehicles
for money laundering and sex trafficking.
‘Once upon a time there were up to
1,200 cinema halls in Bangladesh,’ says
Bithi. Today only 174 are active. Cinemas
were once popular with the working
classes, she says, but the remaining halls
are cineplexes where ‘the ticket price is
high, not accessible for normal people –
rickshaw drivers, daily [wage] labourers’.Independent women
Despite Dhallywood’s decline – and the
subsequent lack of job opportunities –
many of the industry’s loyal extras con-
tinue to frequent the studios daily. FDC’s
modernist buildings are striking, but
many are abandoned and dilapidated- there is even the film set of a roman-
tic garden which has gone into disrepair,
complete with dried-up pond and rickety
bridge.
Here sits Shanta, who says that as a
teenager in late 1990s Dhaka, she would
‘do housework carrying a radio, listen-
ing to cinema songs all day’. She watched
the big stars on television and, she says, ‘a
secret grew up inside of me: that I would
one day act alongside them’.
Shanta married young and was
widowed when she was 17. An older friend
took her to Dhallywood. Shanta began
working as an extra to support herself
and her daughter – sometimes alongside
the stars she idolized. Shanta says she has
‘an emotional attachment’ to the indus-
try. ‘I came here to fulfil my dreams,’ she
says, ‘I can’t leave now.’
Shanta’s friend Shefali came to Dhal-
lywood at 18, alone and ‘in a situation
where I was facing problems that I walked
away from’. Passing a film set one day,
she stopped to watch the shooting. ‘Sud-
denly someone came up to me and asked
if I wanted to act,’ she says. Over the
Photographs – Alice McCoolNOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2019 57Left top: Bulu Bari is a regular at the Bangladesh
Film Development Corporation complex – but
work is scarce.
Left bottom: Clumsily censored posters outside
a cinema hall in Dhaka announce the latest
potboiler.