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There is new hope for the Pakistani film industry, now that film-making as an area of study is attracting new interest in the country. Film schools in the U.S. invest heavily on resources such as infrastructure, equipment and facilities to provide hands-on training to their students. However, media is relatively a new phenomenon in this part of the world, especially Pakistan. There is not much left from the past to improve the current state of affairs of the Pakistani film industry which seems to have now been left to rot. The television boom has finally happened in Pakistan but unfortunately the Pakistani TV industry has not been able to offer much respite to the entertainment-starved people while the local film industry appears to have been almost snuffed out of existence.
While successive governments have focused on development of television facilities in the country from the time it was first launched in 1964, they did not accord the same attention to the film industry which was inherited from the pre-Partition days and was, in fact, quite a thriving activity in Lahore and later in Karachi right up to the 70s. Perhaps, it may not even be fair to hold the state accountable for the film industry's decline as filmmakers themselves did not make any serious efforts to develop the industry on modern lines and were content with earning quick profits from low quality films.
Films truly reflect the art and culture of a country but those who mattered in the Pakistani film industry allowed this very effective medium to almost die down over the years through their sheer negligence and non-stop greed. Many years back, a well-known Indian actress on a visit to Pakistan remarked that the country with a large educated middle class deserved to have a quality film industry as well and she could not understand why this had not happened. People outside Pakistan, particularly in India, which has such a thriving film industry, often wonder that when Pakistan could achieve high standards in television production, particularly in the drama genre, why couldn't it attain similar standards in its feature films?
It is good to know that young people in the country are eager to make a difference in film-making now. To some extent, their interest is reflected in media study programs being offered at various universities in Pakistan, where students pursuing degree programs in media arts are determined to make better films than what has generally been done so far. However, there is still a long way to go as film education being offered at present lacks key prerequisites such as infrastructure, equipment, facilities and related services. As such, institutions offering film education programs are still not adequately equipped to give well-rounded education and training in this sector.
I am a film graduate from the Columbia College in Chicago, which is by far the largest and one of the best film schools in the U.S. I have been fortunate to have learned film-making under a qualified faculty and using the best available resources. I have been teaching film for the past nine years in Pakistan at various prestigious institutions and have tried to pass on my knowledge and experience to my students but it has been difficult to produce good results owing to the lack of facilities and industry-standard equipment.
Over the last few years of my endeavor to improve standards of media education, I have successfully managed to set up my own private film school in Pakistan, known as the South Asian Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Television (SAAMPT). The school syllabus is comparable to the best film schools in the U.S. or U.K. Despite its limitations, SAAMPT is making efforts to provide the best learning tools to its students.
It has been a monumental task for SAAMPT to acquire cameras, projectors, editing apparatus and books from the U.S. as it is extremely difficult to import equipment into Pakistan. SAAMPT was fortunate to have procured used equipment in good working order but there is still so much more that needs to be done. SAAMPT has also received donations from a film school in the U.S. for which we are extremely grateful. Let us hope that our friends in the U.S. will continue to support film education in Pakistan to enable students to work on industry-standard equipment.
If such efforts are adequately encouraged and good films start coming out of Pakistan, it will further help in creating create soft image of the country. Besides providing funding and used equipment, the U.S. can also share its expertise and assist in setting up film labs and other related facilities for the training and facilitation of the newly emerging breed of film-makers in the country. And let's hope that when such facilities become available, there will also be a mechanism in place to prevent it from being hijacked by the ‘traditional' film-makers who have driven the national film industry to its present state of ruin. 
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