Saturday, June 20th marks the first day in 22 years since Nablus, the largest urban center in the West Bank, Palestine has an operating movie theater. Cinema City, owned by Marwan Masri and directed by Bashir Sheka, is a one-screen theater near the heart of the Old City district of Nablus. The entrance to the theater is framed by a still from Charlie Chaplin’s first feature length movie, The Kid (1921). Director of Cinema City, Bashir Sheka, said he believes the still is appropriate for a movie theater in the Occupied Territories where a people’s sense of humor is that of the underdog. He quoted the title screen of The Kid which reads “A comedy with a smile, and perhaps a tear.” The first movie Cinema City screened was an Egyptian comedy titled Ramadan Mabrouk Abo El 3alamen Hamoda directed by Wael Ihsan.
1921 is also the year that Mr. Sheka’s first family owned theater opened in Nablus. The family’s first theater was shut down in 1987 during the first Palestinian Intifada and remains closed. Mr. Sheka says this theater had a capacity of 1,300 seats. Its projectors from 1935 remain intact and could operate if the power was turned on. Cinema City currently seats about 200 people.
Mr. Marwan Masri, the owner of Cinema City, said it took 1 year to negotiate the opening of the new theater. The difficulties can be attributed to distributors in Lebanon and Egypt who view Palestine as too unstable for business.
Mr. Masri spoke of Nablus’ three old cinemas which all were built between the 1920 and the early ’40s. All three remain closed. Mr. Sheka noted that entertainment in general is difficult to come by in Nablus. Coffee shops, known as Muqawahs, are a main source of entertainment where locals patron a corruption of the hours. “Nablus,” Mr. Sheka said, has been a closed city surrounded by checkpoints for so long. He continued saying “We open this one [theater] for a new beginning.” Mr. Hamdallah, the Minister of Culture in Palestine, expressed his desire to see all theaters re-opened so that the youth might aspire to filmmaking as a creative outlet for telling their own stories.
In the early 1900s, in front of movie theaters across America, cardboard cutouts of a tramp not unlike The Kid stood holding a sign saying “I AM HERE TODAY.” This message, perhaps more than any other, is important for many Nablusis to say to those who watch Palestinians, as Chaplin audiences once watched the Tramp himself; with a smile, perhaps without a tear.