Till about the late 1970s, the Pakistan film industry was regularly releasing an average of 80 films a year. In fact, there were also periods when the industry put out over a hundred films in a single year.

And then, it all stopped.

In July 1977, the populist regime of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Pakistan Peoples Party) was toppled in a military coup masterminded by General Ziaul Haq.

In 1979, Zia oversaw the execution of Bhutto through a sham trial and consolidated his grip over power.

Zia’s was a reactionary dictatorship. He went after his detractors with concentrated ruthlessness.

After Bhutto’s toppling and hanging, the era of populist extroversion came to a close, giving way to social introversion that had little to do with self-reflection, and more with the need to hide one’s political and social self in an era of open religious propagation and reactive legislation that was directly opposed to the 1970s populist bearings.

One cultural symptom of this social and cultural rollback was the abrupt collapse of the Pakistani film industry.

As if all of a sudden Urdu films that till 1979 had been doing good business rapidly started to lose its main (middle-class) audiences.