A Pakistani film will hit Chinese cinemas for the first time in more than 40 years this November, as Beijing seeks to bolster relations withParwaaz Hai Junoon
Beijing has invested tens of billions of dollars in Pakistan in recent years, financing railways, hydropower projects and other infrastructure, and gaining access to the country’s highly strategic Gwadar port. The dependence on Chinese investment has pushed Pakistan to repeatedly take China’s side on human rights abuses and other issues.
Billed as “a tribute to the Pakistan airforce,” the film mixes colorful song and dance numbers, a love story and action elements to tell the story of the trials and tribulations of a group of patriotic young cadets who become Pakistan’s best fighter pilots, including a young woman who leaves behind a privileged life to join them.
Covell Meyskens, a historian of modern China in the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval Postgraduate School in California, notes with a laugh that the focus on fighter jets makes sense, given that it’s a trick Hollywood has used for years in films since “Top Gun.” Some, like Adnan Ali Kahn, general manager of the country’s largest cinema chain Cineplex, speculate that this content vacuum could make space in Pakistan for Chinese action films dubbed into Urdu, if they were better marketed, or if Chinese companies could be bothered to care. Currently, local moviegoers are mostly drawn to action titles but “have no choice but to watch Hollywood movies in English,” he told Xinhua.
Only a half dozen Pakistani films have ever even screened in China in recent years, and only at government-run, highly politicized Chinese film festivals created to serve Beijing’s foreign policy agenda, such as the “Shanghai Cooperation Organization Film Festival” and the Silk Road International Film Festival.
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