Bangladesh National Film Awards: Celebrating the Best of Dhallywood Each Year

Every year, Dhaka’s Bangabandhu International Conference Centre fills with the country’s best-known actors, directors, and technicians for the Bangladesh National Film Awards — the only film honours presented directly by the government and, by most measures, the most significant award ceremony in the national industry.

The awards were established in 1975, with the first ceremony held on 4 April 1976 to honour films released the previous year. The original lineup of categories was modest — best film, best director, best actor, best actress — reflecting an industry still finding its institutional footing. That changed through the 1990s and 2000s, as the awards expanded to include technical categories such as art direction, cinematography, and editing, tracking the growing sophistication of Bangladeshi film production.

Today, the ceremony is organised by the Ministry of Information as a formal state function, typically opened by government officials and capped with statuettes handed over by the Prime Minister or a senior delegate, alongside live musical performances. No single year illustrates the awards’ scale better than 2011, when Nasiruddin Yousuff’s Guerrilla won ten awards in a single ceremony — including Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and a Best Actress win for Jaya Ahsan — a sweep that remains the record for the most National Film Awards won by one feature.

For performers and directors alike, a National Film Award functions less as a single accolade than as a career marker. Actors such as Shakib Khan, Ferdous Ahmed, and Chanchal Chowdhury have each collected multiple wins across decades of work, while singer Runa Laila’s seven wins for Best Female Playback Singer stand as one of the ceremony’s longest individual records. As Bangladeshi cinema pushes further onto the international festival circuit, the National Film Awards remain the one honour the industry still measures itself against first.