INDIAN entrepreneur and film director Sohan Roy on Thursday hosted a red carpet screening for his 3D Oscar-nominated movie titled Dam 999 at Ster Kinekor, Joina City in Harare.
The movie, which tells the story of the impending disaster posed by aging dams, was first premiered in India in 2011 alongside the novel Dam999.
Roy told Standard Style that the film faced sanctions upon it's release in India and the ban for the movie gets renewed after every six months.
“The movie was made in 2011 and it became one of the most controversial movies ever made in India and the parliament got involved too," Roy said.
"It is a true story of a real dam in India where the dam is in one state and the water is used by another state and the contract is there for 999 years.
“Parliament does not want to change the contract and the dam is already more than 100 years old and anytime it can burst as there are some prone areas already.
"If this dam burst, 2.5 million people would die.
“No one seems to be bothered by this, my friends and family are staying around this dam and it gets me worried.
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"The court banned the movie back in India in 2011 and again after six months till date they are renewing the ban."
According to a study published at the Yale School of the Environment, engineers have found cracks in the 63-year old 420-foot-high Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River in Southern Africa which has the potential of killing 3.5 million people who live downstream.
The World Bank estimates that globally there are already 19,000 large dams more than 50 years old.
Roy said governments all over the world should make plans to replace old dams.
“Dams are all over the world and probably every country has this issue so it is up to them to make plans to replace them," he said.
"Unfortunately, when constructing a dam, people do not plan for its decommission and all of a sudden we can never stop the operation of any dam because it is either built for power generation, irrigation or freight control."
He urged local theatres to improve their production quality so as to encourage more people to visit theatres.
“I was very upset after seeing the poor projection quality here, people here should really work on improving the production quality because if they don’t people will stop coming to the theatre,” said Roy.
“This was also happening in India, Indian theatres were closing one by one and after our movie release we faced the same issue, hence decided to convert and improve the theatres to 4K and people started coming back."
"Today almost all the Indian Theatres are in 4K projection quality and more and more people are coming."
