Film City

The Punjab government's decision to establish a 50 acre Film City in Lahore is a welcome effort to support the local film industry and revive its history of producing high-quality content. The Film City is supposed to serve as an "end to end" media production hub and promises to bring film, television, animation and digital media under one roof. This would help filmmakers and TV producers who often struggle with crumbling infrastructure, a lack of modern studios, and the added costs of sending post production work overseas.

The ambitious project envisions everything needed to produce a quality movie - modern sound stages, post production labs, dedicated VFX facilities, and even a central lake for large scale shoots. This would reduce the need to involve foreign companies during post-production, and even location shots which used to require trips abroad can be recreated in-studio or on 'living sets'. To be Located within Nawaz Sharif IT City, the Film City would be large enough to house training and education programmes for TV and film industry professionals and students, which could provide a much-needed shot in the arm for classical musicians, for instance, who have seen opportunities to get good-paying work dry up in recent years.

Moreover, when paired with the government's separate Rs2 billion revival fund and new tax incentives, Film City could bring about a new golden age, as movies will have reasonable budgets and quality scripts, rather than antiquated computer imagery and dialogue that makes drama into comedy, comedy into tragedy, and the entire viewing experience a horror show.

The only valid criticism of the project seems to be around cost, but given the potential for Nawaz Sharif IT City to generate over a million jobs, and the fact that money would still need to be spent to develop the region anyway, the government support will be a miniscule additional investment that will reap benefits many times over, not just in the film industry, but related technology fields, as workers with essential cross industry skills - such as animation - will be able to move around with ease.