On Saturday, a group of film enthusiasts in Brahmanbaria planned to do something entirely ordinary: watch a film together, discuss it, and go home. The film in question was Bonolota Express, a well-received Eid-ul-Fitr release directed by Tanim Noor, adapted from a novel by Humayun Ahmed. The venue was Annada Government High School. The organiser was Brahmanbaria Film Society, who had already run eight previous sessions of its “Bhatghumer Cinema Adda” series, steadily building a space for film culture and critical discussion in the district. The ninth screening should have been no different.
But it was not to be. The protest did not emerge spontaneously. It began with a social media post by a leader of a local right wing student organisation, who wrote that Brahmanbaria was “a city of Islamic scholars” where cinema had once been stopped, and demanded the administration ensure “the religious and social environment of Brahmanbaria remains intact.” He circulated the film’s poster marked with a red cross. The post gained traction and an organised campaign followed, with some even claiming the film’s content to be “un-Islamic” despite the film’s censor board clearance. On Friday evening, the deputy commissioner confirmed suspension of the screening because some people “were expressing various forms of anger,” and allowing it the next day “would not be appropriate.”
That statement deserves careful reading. The deputy commissioner did not say the screening was illegal. He did not say the film lacked certification or that the organisers had done anything wrong. His statement, in effect, handed authority over what is permissible not to the law, but to whoever is willing to be most vocally opposed.
Tanim Noor, who is from Brahmanbaria, responded with understandable frustration. He claimed that any film with censor board clearance can legally be screened anywhere in the country, and that marking a movie’s poster with a cross and circulating it online is not a legitimate protest.
Strictly speaking, his claim on screening rights may sit uneasily with the existing law: the Cinematograph Act, 1918 requires exhibitions to take place only at licensed venues, and the Censorship of Films Act, 1963 further empowers the government to prescribe specific places where certified films may be shown.
But to dwell on this is to miss the point entirely. Brahmanbaria Film Society was not screening the film commercially. If this screening had gone ahead without incident, as the previous eight had, no one would have raised a word about venue certification. The legal question surfaced only because of the controversy.
In this context, the school authority’s role deserves scrutiny too. The organisers claimed preliminary consent from the headteacher of Annada Government High School. But the teacher denied that permission was granted and, instead, added that there was “no question of allowing film screenings at an educational institution.”
One of these accounts is incorrect, and the truth matters. What is notable is the framing the headteacher chose: not that circumstances had changed, but a categorical statement that a school is simply not a place for cinema. Schools that host debates, theatre productions, and literary recitations have always also been places where films can be watched and discussed. To declare otherwise—in the middle of a politically charged controversy—is not a neutral administrative position. It is a concession dressed as a rule. Whether the school gave consent and withdrew it, or never gave it at all, the institution told its students something lasting: that principle bends under pressure, and that the surest way to get what you want is to generate enough unease that those in authority find reasons to step aside.
What happened next stripped away any remaining ambiguity. When filmmaker Adib Reza Rongon arranged a private village screening in Kasba on Saturday night, five to seven police vehicles reportedly arrived 15 minutes before it was due to begin and shut it down. When Rongon asked why, he claimed police termed the censor-certified film “obscene.”
In recent years, this pattern has played out with dispiriting regularity. In June last year, the screening of Taandob in Kalihati, Tangail, lawfully permitted and paid for, was shut down after local groups protested through mosque loudspeakers, tore down posters, and submitted a petition. Police refused to intervene. In September 2024, music was banned at the Urus celebration at Shah Paran Mazar in Sylhet, not by government order but because the shrine’s caretaker capitulated under threat. That November, the Lalon Fair in Narayanganj was cancelled after the district administration yielded to a local religious group. In February 2025, a Lalon commemoration in Madhupur was cancelled after religious groups declared the mystic saint’s philosophy incompatible with Islam. In the same month, a crowd attacked a stall at Amar Ekushey Boi Mela over books by controversial author Taslima Nasreen. Then in April 2025, theatre group Prangonemor saw its production cancelled by a Dhaka auditorium after receiving a threatening letter—only restored after the then cultural affairs adviser intervened. This comes alongside the interim government’s decision in November to scrap plans for music and physical education teachers in primary schools, following pressure from religion-based organisations.
One ought to acknowledge that this tendency of suppressing cultural expression has a long history in Bangladesh, and Brahmanbaria bears some of its deepest scars. In March 2021, in protest of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit on the occasion of Bangladesh’s 50th independence anniversary and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s birth centenary, activists of a religion-based right-wing group vandalised and torched Sur Samrat Alauddin Sangeetangon in Kumarshil. The music academy had been established in 1956 in memory of Ustad Alauddin Khan, the legendary classical musician born in the district. Students of religion-based schools had targeted the same academy in 2016 as well.
Both attacks occurred under the Awami League government, which chose accommodation over accountability in its relationship with some right wing organisations for much of its tenure. That history cannot serve as justification for what follows it. Bangladesh now has a government built on the aspirations of a generation that demanded accountability. It cannot be new only in some respects while remaining familiar in others, precisely where the pressure is greatest. And it should register, with some weight, that the city now being told cinema has no place in it is the same city where a music academy honouring one of the subcontinent’s greatest musicians was burned to the ground—twice.
There is a quieter consequence that rarely gets discussed. Filmmakers, writers, musicians and artists across the country are watching—not calculating whether their work is legal or important, but whether it is worth navigating what might happen if the wrong people object, and whether institutions can be trusted to provide even basic support. Many will privately decide the answer is no. That decision will never be announced. It will simply result in work that is not made, and a cultural life that contracts a little more, each capitulation making the next campaign easier to mount, and the next institution quicker to fold.
Those opposing the screening were explicit in their desire to define Brahmanbaria’s identity in narrow terms, framing cinema as incompatible with the character of the place. That is a territorial argument, not a theological one, made by a self-selected group on behalf of a population that was never consulted. The freedom to organise a film screening, in a school hall, of a legally certified film, without having it suspended because some people posted objections on social media, is not a complicated ask. It is a baseline. When the administration declines to protect that baseline, treating social media noise as sufficient grounds to suspend a film screening, it is not staying neutral. It is making a choice, with consequences that reach well beyond Brahmanbaria and well beyond one single Saturday afternoon.
Jannatul Naym Pieal is a writer, researcher, and journalist. He can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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