Dallywood
Dallywood is the Bangladesh film industry is
based in Dhaka. Dallywood
is the hollywood of Bangladesh. The capital city
of Bangladesh is Dhaka and, so the "D" represents
dhaka and implies the movie town of Bangladesh.
As of 2004, it produced approximately 100 movies
a year. The average movie's budget was about 6500000 Bangladeshi taka.
History
It is possible that the first motion
pictures seen in Dhaka were shown by John Stevens
in 1896–1897 as part of a touring theater company;
however, documentary evidence of this is not available.
On April 24, 1898, the Bengali weekly Dhaka Prokash
reported that films were shown in Dhaka by the Bredford
Bioscope Company, at the Crown Theatre, in Patuatuli,
near Sadarghat. The show included news items and
other short features. The first permanent cinema
in Dhaka, named Picture House, began operation during
1913–1914. This cinema was renamed to New Picture
House and then again to Shabistan. By 1947 there
were around 80 cinemas in what is now Bangladesh.
The first Bengali organization for
producing and exhibiting films was the Royal Bioscope
Company, established in 1898 in Calcutta by Hira
Lal Sen. Although feature films were made in Bengali
as early as 1919 (Bilwa Mangal), most production
was done in Calcutta. The Nawab family of Dhaka
produced Sukumari (1928–1929) and The Last Kiss
(1931).
After the partition of India in 1947,
the first film made in East Pakistan was a newsreel
about the visit of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, produced
in 1948 by the radio broadcaster Nazir Ahmed. The
first full-length feature film with sound made in
East Pakistan was Mukh O Mukhosh, which was produced
by Abdul Jabbar Khan and released on August 3, 1956.
Editing, printing and all other film processing
for this movie was done in Lahore, Pakistan.
The East Bengal Provincial Assembly
established the East Pakistan Film Development Corporation
(EPFDC) on April 3, 1957. The first film produced
by this organization was Asiya (The Life of a Village
Girl, 1960), directed by Fateh Lohani. During the
late 1960s, between 20 and 35 films were produced
each year. Production quantity continued to increase
after Bangladesh gained its independence on December
16, 1971; in 1979, for example, 51 films were released,
and in the 1990s over 90 films per year were released.
Recently, the Bangladeshi film industry has faced
increased competition from foreign films, satellite
TV, home video, and other sources. Viewership of
Bangladeshi films has dropped, and the industry
has been criticized for producing low-quality films
whose only appeal is that of sex, violence, or melodrama
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