ARY Films To Produce 4 Films Every Year, Announces Arth 2 and Mission 5

For the past many years, I am of the view that Pakistanis face a serious dearth when it comes to the means of entertainment. And perhaps the only thing left to entertain themselves is to go out and have some food. That’s it!

But Now It seems that one of the entertainment source is on the road to recovery and the developments taking place in the past few months have been very encouraging with regards to the local cinema. Just couple of days back there has been a huge news for the Pakistan film industry as ARY Films and Riaz Shahid Films signed a joint venture agreement which will see them producing, distributing and marketing 4 films every year.

But as of now, 2 movies were announced named Arth 2 and Mission 5. The signing of this Joint Venture came after the mighty success of recently released films. Main Hoon Shahid Afridi and Zinda Bhaag were two of those films that created quite a lot of stir but it was the massive release of WAAR that has set the stage for the revival of cinema, opening doors for some serious investments in this field.

Shaan Shahid, who now also heads the Riaz Shahid Films (named after his late father), seems to be very excited about this development. He says,

“This is not just collaboration but a marriage of two ideologies. And it will mark a new era of Pakistani film industry. I hope this collaboration will further raise the standard of Pakistani cinema and will bring it to the international front creating a soft image of Pakistan.”

Arth 2 is going to be a re-make of a Bollywood movie that was earlier directed by the famous Mahesh Bhatt from across the border. And now the rights have been bought from Mr. Bhatt in order to do its re-make locally. The shoot of this project will commence from the third week of December. The talented Sahir Ali Bagga is going to do the music of the movie where as the veteran Pervaiz Kaleem is looking after the script of this re-make.

Mission 5 is the other film announced under this particular banner that is going to be an action packed thriller and will be shot on the historic Pak-Afghan border. The interesting thing here is that Mission 5 will be directed by internationally acclaimed Hollywood director Tom Delmar. It should be remembered that he is the same guy who was first roped in for the direction of recently released Waar. Tom will be directing Mission 5 whose story line will be written by Shaan and Hassan Rana (producer and writer of WAAR).

ARY Films and Riaz Shahid Films are also planning to organize an international film festival tentatively scheduled to be held in the last quarter of 2014. The festival will see the work from diverse countries such as Spain, Italy china, Saudi-Arab, Sri Lanka. This activity is expected to create a positive platform for the local industry that can exhibit our own art and culture, and in return getting the influences from the global industries in order to modernize and strengthen the local cinema.

Let’s see how successful does this joint venture gets because releasing 4 films of high caliber every year is going to be a big ask for an industry that is still in its re-building phase. Even the much hyped WAAR took around about 3 years to finally hit the cinemas so it would be interesting to see how the audiences respond to this new wave of films coming their way.

Best of luck to both the parties that are coming together for this joint venture. We expect these familiar names that are on board to really come up with something new and actually raise the bar for themselves.

Cheers!

-Uzair