'Lollywood' Hits Bollywood
Iman Ali's "Khuda Kay Liye" is the first Pakistani film India's shown in years.
NEW DELHI, April 4, 2008 — -- Leaving the theater after watching the new movie, "Khuda Kay Liye," the first Pakistani film to be released in India in more than four decades, Sahid Anmad and Samir Agarwal finally found something they could agree on involving India and Pakistan: they both loved Pakistani women.
Sure, it was easy to fall in love with Iman Ali, a real-life supermodel in Pakistan and the female star of the movie. But there was something else her character did that united these two Indian law students, one a Muslim from Kashmir, one a Hindu who firmly believed Kashmir was part of India.
"Someone who's ready to die, someone who is a religious fanatic, he will do anything because he has nothing to lose," Anmad told ABC News, sitting outside the theater after the first New Delhi screening of the film. "What the movie showed is that there are those of us Muslims who want what everyone else wants: to have a family. To have a good life. And to have a good woman."
"I have a problem with Pakistani politicians," Agarwal said, sitting next to his friend. "But I don't have a problem with Pakistanis or with Islam. And she," he says, referring to Ali, "she was beautiful. And she was inspiring."
"Khuda Kay Liye" follows the stories of two musician brothers who grew up in Lahore, Pakistan's most liberal city and its center for art and culture. One moves to Chicago, inspires a group of American musicians into spontaneous orchestration, marries an American but is then illegally detained and tortured by the U.S. government. The other brother becomes a radical, moves to a village along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and fights the United States in Afghanistan.
The two twenty-something friends had just emerged from seeing the three-hour epic that many see as a symbol of cooling tensions between India and Pakistan, neighbors that have fought three wars. "Khuda Kay Liye," or "In the Name of God," became the first "Lollywood" film distributed widely across India since 1965.
India and Pakistan are still mortal enemies who both see Kashmir as their own. In Pakistan, "Kashmir Day" is a national holiday on which Pakistanis rally beneath banners that declare, "Stop Indian Atrocities in Kashmir." The Indian military is always on high alert along the border.
But the two countries had been in peace talks for nearly four years, and attacks across the border have fallen significantly during that time. Just today, the Indian external affairs minister called his counterpart in Pakistan and pledged to return to the negotiating table "at an early date," according to the Press Trust of India.
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