The recent banning of the film Brokeback Mountain is “exposing the kind of hypocritical thinking that we have in society”, lawyer and social activist Paul Moss told The Tribune yesterday.
Mr Moss said that a certain amount of censorship is necessary, but that he believes that the Bahamas Plays and Film Control Board is too liberal.
“Generally I would not want the government to censor unilaterally on issues of national importance. I do believe that that there is merit in the censorship of the kinds of movies that come into our country, but the thing is that we need to censor more movies,” Mr Moss said.
He said that there are many vices that are glorified in films that are shown in the Bahamas.
Mr Moss said he believed that the only reason Brokeback Mountain was banned was for its homosexual content, rather than a concern about morality in general.
“I believe that there should be more censorship in that regard so that we can have the kind of edifying and up-lifting theatre or movies that will advance our society as a whole. Along with Brokeback Mountain they probably need to ban everything they are showing to the movies today,” Mr Moss said.
Veteran Bahamian director of plays and actor Philip Burrows in a recent interview with The Tribune said that it appears that the Control Board does not have any set criteria on which they base their decisions to ban movies.
Mr Burrows said he thought it curious that the board banned Brokeback Mountain, yet allowed the musical Rent, which depicts two gay relationships, to be shown a few months ago.
He explained that he has dealt with the Control Board for a number of years with the production of plays, and still has “no idea how they come to their decisions.”
Mr Burrows said that in 2001 when Ringplay Productions, of which he is the artistic director, decided to produce Macbeth, members of the Control Board on the evening before the play was to open,
gave it a ‘C’ rating, ensuring that only adults would be able to see it.
“Macbeth, a Shakespeare work being studied in high school would be rated ‘C’ so that no high school students studying it would be able to see it. We protested this rating and informed the board members that this was in fact a work being studied in high school and after some discussion they relented and rated the production ‘B’,” he said.
However, two years later a repeat performance of the production which was staged slightly different but with not one word of the text changed – was rated ‘T’ and described by some members of the board as a “wonderful production”, Mr Burrows said.
Source: The Tribune
