DHAKA, Jan 16, 2021 (BSS) – Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen
today urged the filmmakers to make films patronizing the saddest
stories of Rohingyas for further sensitizing world community about
unimaginable atrocities that were committed against an ethnic group.
“An ethnic minority (Rohingya) that are the victims of hatred and
enmity in a land of Buddhism (Myanmar) that believe in Ohinsho and
Nirvana, self-purification where hatred and killing is unthinkable and
against his teaching,” he said.
Dr Momen made the remark while inaugurating the 19th Dhaka
International Film Festival organized by the Rainbow Film Society at
National Museum in the capital this afternoon.
Bangladesh is hosting over 1.1 million forcefully displaced
Rohingyas in Cox’s Bazar district and most of them arrived there since
August 25, 2017 after a military crackdown by Myanmar, which the UN
called a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” by
other rights groups.
Indian High Commissioner Vikram K Doraiswami spoke as the special
guest at the inaugural ceremony of the festival that will screen 226
films from 73 countries.
The foreign minister said films are one of the most poignant and
invasive instruments accessible to the humankind for venturing into
the realms of the mind, of the memory and of the imaginations that
define the “human story”.
“Films depict the art that transcends the boundaries of lives and
livings and tell the stories which, often, we are even afraid to tell
or look at,” he added.
Noting that the COVID-19 pandemic has inflicted untold sufferings
for the artistes, he said the government has reopened the theaters
under conditions of health and social-distancing restrictions for the
sake of film industry.
Momen hoped that the festival would provide a boost to the
country’s film industry, and inspire all the participating artistes to
produce even better films in the future.
Lauding that this year festival is dedicated to the birth centenary
of Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, he said,
“It is coming up at a cusp of time when we are crossing over from
within the ‘Mujib Year’ to the Golden Jubilee of our Independence.”
The minister recalled with the deepest respect that it was
Bangabandhu who had first tabled the bill in the provincial assembly
of erstwhile East Pakistan for the formation of Film Development
Corporation (FDC) in 1957.
This FDC eventually became BFDC after the independence of
Bangladesh -and till today holds and nurtures the principal foundation
of Bangladesh’s Film Industry, he said.
“I am also very happy that a biopic on the Father of the Nation,
documenting the life and works of the greatest Bengali of all times,
Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s – a Bangladesh-India joint venture
production also commences ‘shooting’ this January, he said.