The attempt to rebuild Pakistan's cinema culture-video

On the fifth take, everything appeared to have come together. The script monitors confirmed that the two actors had got their lines right, the woman in charge of the set was pleased with how the crumbling apartment in a Karachi slum had been dressed, and the camera operator was content with the shot. But the distant screech of a motorbike from the teeming streets outside wrecked the take (barking mutts, the bane of earlier attempts, had been successfully shooed away by the crew's "dog team"). "OK, again," sighed the director, Jamshed Mahmood. "Sound is our biggest problem in Pakistan," he said. That, and a lack of cinema houses to show the work of movie makers, chronic DVD piracy and the near-complete collapse of the country's once vibrant film industry.