Adnan Siddiqui, Ahsan Khan, Zahid Ahmed and other stars talked about film reviews, Eid releases and the intricacies of cinema.
For the first time in Pakistan, representatives from the film industry decided to gather together for a roundtable to discuss topics such as filmmaking, cinematic criticism, stereotypical characters and film versus drama. The hour-long roundtable conference was led by film critic Kamran Jawaid and the guests included filmmakers behind and actors featured in five films releasing this Eid: Dum Mastam, Parde Mein Rehnay Do, Chakkar and Ghabrana Nahi Hai.
The discussion was a SeeShows, Anthem presentation in association with The Arena Cinema called Cine-Eid. It featured Jawaid as the producer and host and actor Ahsan Khan, director Yasir Nawaz, producer and actor Adnan Siddiqui, actor Amar Khan, actor Zahid Ahmed, producer Hassan Zia, actor Ali Rehman Khan and director Wajahat Rauf as guests.
Jawaid said he'd been working on having the roundtable discussion materialise since 2019 and the pandemic delayed it further. But to his surprise, the process of organising it was very smooth. “Roundtables don't happen in Pakistan for a couple of reasons โ first of all, it's near impossible getting people on that same table, especially when these people or these actors and producers have films coming out in competition with each other so that's a problem.
“All it took was one phone call for everyone to say yes for doing this. That shows the state of the industry right now, everybody's on board, everybody is eager to do something different. And they're eager to support causes that would support the Pakistani industry in the long term,” he said, expressing gratitude.
The film critic said he wanted to prove a point by gathering the industry and uniting them on a single platform to talk about movies and the industry in general. “One major fault is that we keep asking the stars…