Pakistan's cinema revival: the 2010s turnaround

The word revival gets used loosely about Pakistani cinema, usually to mean that films started being released again. The more useful definition is narrower: between 2007 and 2014 a small number of films rebuilt an audience that had stopped going to the cinema, and they did it with social subjects rather than with spectacle. Dukhtar belongs to that group, but it is not where the group starts.

By the early 2000s Pakistani cinema was in poor shape. Cinema houses were closing in the major cities, production had thinned to a trickle, and the screens that survived were mostly showing imported Punjabi and Pashto titles to shrinking houses. What changed was not a policy or a subsidy. It was a handful of films that convinced middle-class Pakistanis that a Pakistani film could be worth the price of a ticket.

The collapse the revival answered

The decline is usually dated from the late 1970s: video piracy, the loss of the single-screen circuit, and a production culture that had settled into formula. By 2003 young filmmakers in Karachi were making low-budget experiments to prove that decent work was possible with limited resources, and the channel Filmazia had begun airing both old Pakistani films and those newer productions.

The geography shifted too: until about 2005 Lahore was the hub for both Punjabi and Urdu films, and after that Karachi increasingly took over as the Urdu centre.

Khuda Kay Liye and the audience that came back (2007)

Shoaib Mansoor's Khuda Kay Liye, released in Pakistan on 20 July 2007, is the film most often named as the turning point. It follows two singer brothers after 9/11 and was a surprise success at a moment when nobody expected a serious Pakistani film to find an audience. Its effect was to bring the middle class back into cinemas.

It also travelled in a way Pakistani films had not for decades. Released in India on 4 April 2008, it was the first Pakistani film to open there in almost half a century, and it became the first Pakistani film included in the official selection of the International Film Festival of India. At home it took three Lux Style Awards and a Silver Pyramid at the Cairo International Film Festival. Its 171-minute runtime and its willingness to argue about religion in public made it the template for what followed.

Bol and the commercial proof (2011)

Mansoor's next film, Bol, released on 24 June 2011, supplied the commercial evidence that the revival was real rather than critical. It broke box office records in Pakistan and won Best Film at the 11th Lux Style Awards, with Humaima Malik taking Best Actress and Manzar Sehbai Best Actor. It also shows how the certification system touches a production: the Central Board of Film Censors reviewed the film in Lahore on 8 November 2010 and approved it the next day.

Bol is a family story about a father who wants a son, built around an intersex character, and it was made in partnership with a maternal and child health project run through Johns Hopkins University's Center for Communication Programs.

2013: the year the wave got a name

Seven Pakistani films reached theatres in 2013, the first time in over a decade that the number had been that high. The year delivered a horror film, a political thriller and an action film that reset the box office, and it produced the film that opened the Oscar door.

Waar, Bilal Lashari's action film, became the highest-grossing Pakistani film ever at the time of its release, a record that held until Jawani Phir Nahi Ani in 2015. Zinda Bhaag, directed by Meenu Gaur, was Pakistan's submission to the Academy Awards, the first in fifty years, and though it did not make the shortlist it changed how the industry talked about itself.

Dukhtar and the festival route (2014)

Dukhtar arrived in 2014 with a different strategy from its predecessors. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 5 September, opened in Pakistan on 18 September in nine cities, and was selected as the country's entry for the 87th Academy Awards, the second consecutive Pakistani submission after Zinda Bhaag. It did not receive a nomination.

Its box office was modest next to Waar or Na Maloom Afraad. The revival produced two economies at once, a commercial one built on comedy and action and a festival one built on social drama, and the second rarely paid for itself at home. Dukhtar's funding came from Norway's Sorfund after years of failed local fundraising.

The screen problem nobody solved

The recurring explanation for why a well-reviewed Pakistani film could still lose money is the number of screens. Digital cinema conversion began around 2011 and grew quickly, reaching roughly thirty DCP-compliant cinemas nationwide by 2014. Thirty screens is not a market. It is a bottleneck, and it meant that even a hit had a ceiling, while a film with a difficult subject had almost no room to build word of mouth.

That constraint shaped the films themselves. The revival's business model assumed three things at once:

• Digital capture and low budgets, because no financier would underwrite a larger negative.
• Small casts and location shooting, which kept the schedule short.
• Festival and diaspora sales counted as part of the return, not as a bonus.

Dukhtar is the purest example of that model, and its modest domestic gross explains why the model did not become the norm.

What the revival actually changed

It changed expectations. Before 2007 a Pakistani film with a social argument was assumed to be unwatchable and unmarketable; after 2013 that assumption was gone, and a generation of directors, editors and cinematographers had credits on films that travelled to Toronto, Busan and London. It did not build an industry that could finance itself without foreign money, and it did not build enough screens to make a mid-budget drama profitable.

That is the honest accounting. The revival was real, it was short, and it was carried by a few filmmakers working without a safety net. Dukhtar sits inside it as the film that proved the festival route worked and the domestic route did not.