Censorship of movies suffer, cinema industry in dilemma

The postponement of the censoring of National Award winning director Dr Biju’s movie Valiya Chirakulla Pakshikal has created a flutter in the cinema circles. The censor screening of the movie was scheduled for July 9, however, it got cancelled a day prior to the screening. Biju says, “I had got the screening date for Thursday (July 9), however, it got postponed a day before the screening, because of the inconvenience of the censor board members.”
Apparently, Dr Biju got a call from the Censor Board on July 8 informing him about the cancellation.When we checked with Prathibha, Regional Censor Board officer, she said, “The censoring process is not stalled, but it was interrupted owing to the on-going legal procedures due to the Premam piracy investigation. Since the feature films needs more time, we couldn’t conduct the screening amidst the busy schedule. Now, we are trying to sort things out and censoring will resume from Monday.”
Biju says that his movie’s censoring is now fixed for next week and he is awaiting an early date for it. He is obviously in a hurry and reveals the reason behind it, “Since, the movie has to be submitted at the Indian Panorama, it needs to be censored before August 31st.” In the meantime, the Anti-Piracy Cell had to obtain a warrant from the court to catch hold of the DVDs of Premam from the censors. When quizzed about it, Prathibha explained, “Reports say that we have failed to hand over the copies of the DVD to the Anti-piracy Cell, before the deadline. That is not true. We need prior permission from the Mumbai headquarters for handing over the copies and we received the nod only on Friday. If the permission had come earlier we would have handed it over without the warrant.”
With several movies lined up for the Ramzan weekend release, some of the filmmakers are a worried lot. While some of the movies have cleared the censors, some are waiting with bated breath. Director of KL 10 Pathu, Muhsin Parari, is hopeful that he will be able to release the movie as planned. “The movie is yet to be censored and I wish it gets a screening at the earliest so that the movie hits the screens for the festival weekend.”