-Rhishav Sapkota
Mr. Sapkota is a research intern at Samriddhi Foundation, an economic policy think tank based in Kathmandu. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not represent the views of the organization. Author can be reached at Rhishav Sapkota [email protected]
The entire film experience is quite straightforward for a liberal mind. You choose to see a movie based on its reviews, word of mouth, a predilection for an actor or director, or pure luck. In an ideal world, you would pay and then watch. The rest of the transaction is entirely up to you. It can entertain you, make you think deeply, or simply make you dislike its trashiness. For those concerned with individual agency and the force of ideas, a film does not fall into neat categories. It is unjust to art and to human liberty.
The government, on the other hand, has a different perspective. It is so suspicious of the human mind’s ability to comprehend that it wishes to stifle the free exchange of ideas between people. The government uses antiquated legislation to oversee the creation, presentation, and distribution of motion films under the guise of a benign guardian. In the attempt, it becomes an arbitrary moral police.
Film censorship in Nepal is governed by the Panchayat-era (1961–1990) Motion Pictures Act of 1969 and its subsequent rules implemented in 2000. Despite several amendments over the years, the provisions of both statutes remain to allow the Film Censorship Board to act as a forceful intrusion into artistic expression.
The Board has the authority to either cut, mute, or outright ban a film. To accomplish this, it hides behind a slew of confusing and all-encompassing terms. These statements range from a potential threat to Nepal’s law and order to an assault on public decency, from advocating immorality to supporting illegal activity. One can argue that free expression has limits, as intellectuals and laypeople have for millennia. But the crucial point here is: Why should the state have a monopoly on determining the boundaries of free expression? And whether it is even possible to have a group of people decide what the limitations are.
Consider the composition of the Board. It includes an eight-person staff at the federal level, including four bureaucrats, a representative from the Film Development Board, and three film specialists chosen by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology. The Board creates its own operational rules, which is hilarious given that it is legally required to carry out all government directions even after it has granted approval for a film to be shown.
If a Censor Board dominated by bureaucrats wasn’t enough, cinema now needs to pay for its own burial. The producers pay the Board members. Not to mention the extra cost of having the film vetted and approved for screening.
A system in which authorities exert disproportionate influence over every decision is the outcome of an antiquated and imprecise statute littered with inconsistent revisions over time. When a bureaucrat-led team is given wide rein to define how artistic expression should appear and sound, the outcome is predictable. This almost always results in a bureaucratic dictatorship.
In his infamous talk at the University of Toronto, Christopher Hitchens eloquently synthesized John Stuart Mill, John Milton, and Thomas Paine on free speech. Everyone in the audience has the right to listen and to hear, and muting someone makes you a prisoner of your own acts because you deny yourself the opportunity to hear something. In other words, in all of these circumstances, your right to hear and be exposed is as important as the other person’s right to express himself or herself.
To put it another way, it is not simply a filmmaker’s right to make a film that may offend someone; it is that person’s right to see it for themselves and determine whether or not to be offended.
The irony is that the current Maoist-dominated administration previously led an armed insurrection against the state, debating the boundaries of what could and could not be stated or done. Subsequent precedents, on the other hand, indicate hypocrisy. In his article History of Cinema Censor Board in Nepal, Harsha Man Maharjan recalls the CPN (Maoist) administration in 2007, when the Censor Board removed parts from filmmaker Dinesh Karki’s film Ahankar, alleging that the film incited animosity between communities. The Censor Board has always been subordinate to the presiding government. The Board’s claim that a society that had witnessed a civil war instigated by the ruling party was not mature enough to examine its politics revealed a scared administration with a panopticon view of freedom.
The message was clear: you can act out violence but not express it through cinema.
The onus is now more than ever on the current administration to dismantle mechanisms that, by definition, cannot appreciate or appraise cinema. It may be able to make up for some of its own contradictions in previous promises and actions by doing that.