Dark screens

By Essam Zakariya

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In my youth Ramadan was the time to go to cinemas. The midnight show was a Ramadan event. The audience would then leave the cinema, have the pre-dawn meal and call it a day.

In the 1970s and 1980s movie theatres did not have year- round midnight screenings -- they were reserved for Ramadan. Not any longer. Movie theatres have decided en masse to close down in Ramadan, citing low revenues as the reason. This leaves the younger generation with nothing but television and coffeehouses. They smoke shisha on sidewalks or watch an endless parade of meaningless talk shows on television where, ironically, most of the guests are movie stars. So, in Ramadan, you cannot see a film, but you get to see the film stars doing what they do worst -- chatting aimlessly.

The decision to close down movie theatres does not make sense to me, for the salaries of the staff have to be paid and many of the films they might screen are produced by the same companies that own the theatres. The cost of keeping the cinemas open cannot, then, be much higher than closing them down, and this is particularly true in the case of the Arab Company, which owns most Cairo cinemas.

Instead of doing something to improve the quality of films, to keep the audience interested in this form of entertainment, the people in charge of our film industry are sending out the message that films are dispensable, and that an entire month without movies is something we can live with. This is the wrong message, both in terms of business and culture.

This week's Soapbox speaker is film critic at Sabah Al-Kheir weekly magazine.