Three times a day dozens of men pack the auditorium, the air heavy with hashish smoke, to watch graphic sex movies: Welcome to the Shama — a pornographic cinema in Pakistan’s Taliban heartland.
For more than 30 years it has supplied erotic fantasies in Peshawar, the main city of northwestern Pakistan which borders the tribal districts that are a haven for Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked militants.
Terrified of being recognized, the Shama’s customers hide their faces as they make their way to the cinema between a goat market and a bus station.
There are three X-rated shows a day in the Shama’s discreet back room, while the main hall is reserved for mainstream movies — the only ones advertised outside.
“Class X” customers pay 200 rupees (US$1.90) and after a brief search by a Kalashnikov-toting guard, they are whisked through a courtyard and down a concrete passageway.
Inside the auditorium a thick cloud of cannabis smoke hangs over the 20-odd rows of tattered fake-leather seats.
During one showing, the hall was more than half full, populated by laborers, farmers, students and others who had come to escape the day-to-day claustrophobia of life in a deeply conservative Muslim region where family and neighbors keep a close eye on everything.
Most arrive alone and want to remain so, arranging themselves around the seats to avoid sitting next to anyone. They are all soon gripped by the drama of the day’s offering, Dostana (“Friendship”), a semi-amateur production made for the Shama in the more liberal eastern city of Lahore.
The plot hinges on a romantic dilemma: The hero, Shah Sawar (“the Horseman” in the local language) cannot decide whether to marry his sweetheart Gulpana or his cousin Doa, chosen for him as a wife by his family.
He decides to “test” his would-be brides and much of the film’s two hours is taken up with long and extremely graphic sex scenes between the Horseman and his paramours.
A reverential hush reigns over the audience throughout, broken only by a few suspicious noises from certain rows, while at least half sneak out before the end.
The formula has made the Shama one of Peshawar’s most successful cinemas at a time when many others have been forced to close.
The Islamization that Pakistan witnessed in the 1980s persuaded many that the silver screen was a sinful depravation bad for the soul of a good Muslim.
The rise of videos, DVDs and the Internet accelerated the decline and now of around 15 cinemas in Peshawar 20 years ago, only seven remain.
Three of them show pornography, sometimes discreetly via clips hidden part way through mainstream action movies. The Shama, the best-known of the three, is regularly full, with tickets three or four times the price of normal films.
Key to its success is showing local-made pornography, which is much harder to find in Peshawar — or on the Internet — than Western adult films.
Coming to see Dostana for a second time, Khaliq Khan, 30, said: “Like a lot of people here I prefer films with Pakistani girls. It’s better, it seems more amateur, more real.”
Dostana is certainly amateurish, with actors regularly turning to the camera quizzically, looking for direction for their next move.
The dialogue is dubbed in Pashto, the main language of the northwest, with an enthusiasm somewhat at odds with the bored, uninterested way the actors seem to be speaking in the original Punjabi.
However, Janus Khan is quite happy. After the screening the laborer, 22, admitted he regularly came to the Shama “to enjoy myself, alone or with one or two friends.”
“I’m not very pious but I’m not a rapist or unfaithful,” he said.
The Shama has provoked controversy in Pakistan, a constitutional Islamic republic with a very conservative attitude to sex and nudity.
Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), one of the country’s leading religious political parties, has demanded the closure of the cinema.
However, the cinema has powerful owners — the Bilour family, one of the most influential in Peshawar and a pillar of the Pashtun nationalist ANP party.
Twice in the past 10 years, Islamist activists including JI students have attacked the Shama, but both times the cinema has risen again.
Burned down in September last year, it reopened a month later just in time for the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, which saw the Shama full.
How the cinema has avoided the attentions of the government censors, who cut even kissing from films, and the Taliban, who have destroyed countless supposedly “immoral” CD and DVD shops in recent years, is not clear.
In private, officials point to the wealth and influence of the Bilours — always useful in a chaotic and corrupt country.
Back on the screen, Dostana draws to its conclusion with the indecisive Shah Sawar drowning his sorrows in alcohol. Still unable to decide he summons the two women for a final menage-a-trois and in the film’s climax at last resolves to marry them both.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion