Message on no-tobacco, anti-booze warnings
Veteran film maker Adoor Gopalakrishnan handing over report to cinema minister Thiruvanchoor Radhakrishnan at PR chambers in Thiruvananthapuram on Wednesday (Photo:DC)
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Adoor Gopalakrishnan Committee Report on ways to streamline Malayalam film industry has asked the State Government to do away with the no smoking and anti-liquor messages that appear at the bottom of the screen whenever a character is shown smoking or consuming liquor. “The appearance of these messages affects the continuity and the visual aesthetics of a film,” the committee report said.
Adoor Gopalakrishnan, while handing over the report to cinema minister Thiruvanchoor Radkhakrishnan here on Wednesday, said that he found it strange that no one in the film industry was speaking against this visual aberration. “I can never allow such messages to sully the visuals that I had painstakingly created,” Adoor Gopalakrishnan said.
The Dada Saheb Phalke award winner found the disclaimers that appear as footnote on the screen as an affront to visual sensibility. “The drinking scenes in even the worst of films, it can be confidently said, have not been included to encourage booze,” he said.
When he was told that the state government could do nothing about the disclaimers as they were part of Union Health Ministry guidelines, Adoor said that the government should still register its protest. “The government cannot sit idle. It has to make its voice heard,” he said, the cinema minister by his side.
Nonetheless, the committee said that awareness messages against drinking and smoking should mandatorily be shown before the start of the film and after the interval.
Adoor Gopalakrishnan said that the committee had not recommended that Malayalam films with English names should be denied KSFDC subsidy. “On the contrary we have only asked that the subsidy amount be increased from Rs 5 lakh to Rs 10 lakh,” Adoor said.
However, there is another recommendation to provide a subsidy of Rs 25 lakh, in addition to the normal subsidy of Rs 10 lakh, to a maximum of ten best films a year. It is for this subsidy that the Committee had recommended that films with English titles be kept out.
( Source : dc correspondent )
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