This is a big shame, the movie should have gone on open release, it’s not a bad movie and deversved to have been more widely available.
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk
Jinnah movie company goes bankrupt
Minister responsible, says ex-envoy’s wife
By Khalid Hasan
WASHINGTON: The Quaid Project Ltd, (QPL) UK, the maker of the Jinnah movie, has been declared bankrupt.
Earlier, a London court had awarded the movie’s Pakistani film director Jamil Dehlavi 58,000 pound sterling plus costs and directed QPL (UK) to pay him.
With the declaration of bankruptcy, Dehlavi is unlikely to recover his dues from the company set up in 1994 by Dr Akbar S Ahmed and some others. The QPL’s current director is Dr Ahmed’s wife, Mrs Zeenat Ahmed, who is now living in Washington with her husband, a professor at the American University, Washington. QPL (UK)’s registered office was in Slough, England.
The movie, a victim of unresolved problems leading to litigation, consequently, has not been released commercially anywhere, except in Pakistan where it ran in both its English and Urdu versions.
Following the bankruptcy, Mrs Ahmed addressed a letter to President Pervez Musharraf, asking him to proceed against Dr Nasim Ashraf, head of the National Commission for Human Development, whom she accused of “theft” and an “Indian connection”.
Dr Ashraf raised a good deal of money in America as head of the Quaid Film Project (USA) that enabled the director, Jamil Dehlavi, to complete the movie.
In her letter to the president, Mrs Ahmed has accused Dr Ashraf of having “encouraged” Jamil Dehlavi to go to the London High Court of Justice and file his lawsuit against QPL. She concedes though that the court directed that monies due to the director’s company, Petra Films Ltd, be paid to it, but takes the position that it was Dr Ashraf and his US-based company that was required to pay Dehlavi and not QPL (UK), something that is not part of the court order which appears to have determined that director Jamil Dehlavi’s company was owed 58,000 pound sterling plus costs by the UK-based QPL.
In her letter to Gen Musharraf, Mrs Ahmed also accuses Dr Ashraf “a minister of your regime standing with Pakistan-hater Farukh Dhondy, who swore on the Bible, although he is a Parsi, both attacking QPL and both giving statements in defence of Dehlavi.” Dhondi, it may be mentioned, was engaged by the producers to co-write the script of the movie, something that would appear to be in ironic clash with what is now being asserted by Mrs Ahmed.
She also accuses Dr Ashraf of trying to sell the movie to Eros, a worldwide Indian entertainment distributor, stating that if the deal goes through and the movie “lands up in the unclean hands of anti-Pakistan and anti-Jinnah Indian-Hindus or the ‘Pakistani’ agents of India — who have been so instrumental in trying to destroy it — they will distort the pure message of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the liberator of the Pakistani Nation. Pakistanis can no longer afford to just sit back, relax and watch the corruption dramas of the corrupt.” Dr Ashraf, who has been given the status of a Pakistan minister of state by President Musharraf, denies the charges and would counter them legally.
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