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Why Nairobi is a Cemetery for Cinemas

By Abdi Ali
Published August 8, 2018

Movie lovers in Nairobi follow proceedings during Lola Kenya Children's Screen festival at Kenya National TheatreNairobi, the capital of Kenya, has become a burial ground for cinema.

As you walk along the streets of the city that is also known as City in the Sun, old cinema buildings that once had an effect on entertainment between the 1960s and 1990s only hold nostalgia for movie lovers. For instance, Kenya Cinema, Fox Drive In, Bellevue, Globe Cinema and Odeon Cinema have become dead businesses.

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So what has killed the motion pictures business?

The death of these businesses, according to analysts, can be attributed to piracy bred by the digital technology. These days anyone can get a movie from just a simple counterfeit DVD. There has been an increase in the number of movie shops that have infringed copyright and stolen movies. The movie scene in Nairobi isn’t as great as, say online gaming entertainment like Sportpesa in Kenya.

For any city’s cinemas to thrive it must have a good number of film-goers. Yes, Nairobi has a good number of movie-lovers but they don’t throng the movie houses of this City of Cool Waters.

There are two primary reasons for this – one, cinema halls haven’t focused on improving their infrastructure, and two, there have been instances of copyright infringement.

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The name Globe Cinema is associated not with movie business but a with a road roundabout.Though Globe Cinema, for instance, was one of the best places to be if you wanted to watch the latest Hollywood and Bollywood movies, , it shut down because its parent company, Grand Theatre Limited, was accused of having infringed its distributor’s copyrights.

Not even its having hosted Daniel arap Moi, Kenya’s second President during a fundraising event, could save it from closure.

Currently, the name Globe Cinema is only associated with Kirinyaga- Kijabe roundabout. This is evidence enough of how pirated DVD has brought down some formerly well established cinemas in Nairobi.

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Cinema houses like Odeon, Shan and Embassy have been turned into churches.Nairobi’s cinema halls can only be described as historic. For instance, Cameo Cinema on Kenyatta Avenue is celebrating 103 years since it was built by Simon Medicks, a Jew. The aim of the cinema was to compete with a popular club located in Parklands at the time. Later it would become the garrison centre where plays were staged until the Kenya National Theatre on Harry Thuku Road stole the spotlight from it.

During the First World War, Cameo Cinema fell into the hands of the military. It became a recruiting centre. The Theatre Royal is also a place that recruited soldiers during the First and Second World Wars. And that is why two monuments are erected outside the cinema hall. They are a tribute to commemorate the heroic deeds of the military.

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Children at Lola Kenya Screen in Nairobi rehearsing and making their movies in Nairobi.These cinemas of yesteryears had picked up a trend that did not endear them to their patrons. When they could not pick up as franchises they closed down and were later turned into Christian churches. This became a pattern for cinema houses like Odeon, Shan and Embassy.

The fall of cinema halls can only be attributed to counterfeits. The government and the creative arts have failed to preserve these monuments that have a place in the history of Kenya.

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