DHAKA, June 25, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Bangladesh authorities have stepped up a year-long campaign against a cancer of obscene films flooding the Asian country.

"Since June last year, we have banned 59 films and shut down 39 cinema halls for showing obscene scenes which go against our cultures and values," Abu Abdullah, vice chairman of Bangladesh's Film Censor Board, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"The 59 films include 37 Bengali and 22 English films," said Abdullah, whose state board certifies whether a film can be shown at the mainly Muslim country's more than 1,000 movie theaters.

The official said the number of films banned was "much higher than at any time in the past" as a result of a stepped-up campaign against obscene films launched last year.

Popularly known as Dhaliwood, the Dhaka-based Bengali film industry churns out some 100 low-budget movies a year at an average cost of about 6.5 million taka (100,000 dollars) each.

Last year Information Minister Mohammed Shamsul Islam instructed censor board officials to enforce the law on obscenity in films, saying failure to do so would result in "moral disaster."

Muslims make up around 80 percent of Bangladesh’s population, making it one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.

Hinduism is professed by about 13 percent of the population while there is a very small Christian community.

Inspectors seized the films for showing bathing scenes, rapes, sexually explicit clips sometimes taken from foreign films and obscene dancing, the censor board said.

"We're now sending our inspectors to the remotest parts of the country to see whether a theater is showing any obscene films. The police and local administration are also cooperating with us," Abdullah said.

The censor board in a report to the information ministry last week said the screening of obscene and sexually explicit films "has contributed to the deteriorating values among the adolescent and youth."

It also dismissed the screening of obscene films as "one of the main reasons for deteriorating law and order in the society".

The four-party government says it has mounted a strong drive to crack down on crime in the face of what the opposition says is increasing lawlessness.

Entertainment critics say a growing number of filmmakers in Bangladesh are producing sexually explicit movies because they are less costly to make and find a ready audience among adolescent and young men.

"Only a few filmmakers now care for family films which were once hallmark of Dhaliwood," said veteran movie critic Naresh Bhuiyan of the film and entertainment magazine, The Weekly Chitralee.

"I saw some of these films (that were banned). These are not films but the worst type of pornography," he said.

"The government should have banned them before they were allowed to run in the movie theaters."