12 - 18 April 2001
Issue No.529
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 12 - 18 April 2001 Issue No.529 |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Childish histrionics
I was happy to find out that, in the past year alone, 50 new film theatres have been built in Egypt.
I was reminded of the cinema I used to go to as a child at the beginning of the last century, the Cinema Beit Al-Qadi (judge's house), which was located close to our house in Khan Gaafar. That was probably the oldest movie theatre in the country. Even when we moved to Abbasiya, I would take my friends and show them where I had gone as a boy. Sometimes the cinema would be shut, its owner would be lounging about in the adjoining café and we would ask him to play something for us, usually a Charlie Chaplin film. I saw the same repertoire of two or three silent movies over and over and over, but I never got bored.
By the time we moved to Abbasiya, other, more modern theatres had opened up elsewhere and I started going there. But I never forgot Beit Al-Qadi.
I loved the cinema as a child, so much that often they had to get me out of the theatre by force, because I would have been perfectly willing to live there. In order to go to the cinema, I would have to be chaperoned by an old retainer. When we took our seats in the auditorium, she would fall asleep almost instantly, while I perked up for the magic unfolding before me on the screen.
Based on an interview by Mohamed Salmawy.
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