This is the story of most of the Nepali films and its makers every week:
On Friday: A film gets released
On Saturday: A critic publishes their review of the film
On Sunday: If the film doesn’t do well, filmmaker starts attacking the critics who had negative reviews for the film.
It’s great to see that Nepali cinema is going through a good phase when some filmmakers are actually making some really good films and pulling a good mass of audiences to the theaters. Our films are making a lot of progress lately – from techniques and equipments to better acting skills, people involved are working hard to create something good to be served to the audiences. But one thing that still bothers us about the film fraternity is the lack of professionalism in most of the people.
Just like filmmaking, reviewing a film is someone’s job and they try their best to not make any mistake. First things first, let’s find out what does ‘film review’ actually means. According to Duke University’s Thompson Writing Program, “The film review is a popular way for critics to assess a film’s overall quality and determine whether or not they think the film is worth recommending.”
Shall we repeat that again? “To assess a film’s overall quality and determine whether or not they think the film is worth recommending”, meaning that a film review must include the critic’s advice for the audiences if they should go and watch the film or not. And this very part seems to have bothered quite a lot of our filmmakers as we’ve seen them making quite a fuss out of such reviews, more particularly on social media.
We admit that Nepali cinema is still under progress and it would help the filmmakers and encourage them if a good number of people go and watch their films. But that does not actually mean that a critic should not be honest with their work and just recommend everyone to watch every single Nepali film, no matter how bad they are. While we always request everyone to support Nepali cinema, we should not forget that it’s a commercial industry and not a charity. Imagine there’s a critic who instead of writing their honest reviews, always writes good things about every Nepali film and asks people to go and watch them. Their readers might go and watch a film or two but it won’t take long for them to realize that the critic is not taking their job seriously and would stop following their reviews. In simple words, you can lie once or twice but the people will find out the truth pretty soon.
If you’re a filmmaker and have got a good review of your film, more particularly from an online portal, you don’t actually need to be very excited about it. We will tell you why. Online portals rely heavily on hits they receive and if they write good things about the film, a lot of people associated with the film are more likely to share the post which simply means a greater amount of views on the post. But if you get some criticisms from such platforms, be happy that you are actually getting brutally honest reviews and try to learn from them.
