Historic Afghan cinema torn down for a mall

A renowned Kabul cinema that for decades attracted the city's film fans is being demolished to make way for a shopping mall, AFP journalists saw Thursday.

Built in the 1960s, the Ariana was pillaged and destroyed in Afghanistan's civil war of 1992-1996, before a French-led restoration effort that saw it reopen in 2004. 

But with the return in 2021 of Taliban authorities and their ban of films, music and other entertainment under their strict interpretation of Islamic law, the cinema was given over to the occasional propaganda film before being shut for good. 

On Thursday, a bulldozer smashed walls amid piles of rubble at the site. 

A banner stated that a "standard modern market is going to be built".

"It shattered my heart, the news of the demolition of the Ariana Cinema. We had a lot of good memories from the cinema," a 65-year-old Kabul resident, who declined to give her name for security reasons, told AFP. 

In the 1970s it used to screen "Indian, Iranian movies in the early years; later on, they also started to screen Russian, English, French, and European movies as well", the woman said. 

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"They used to screen revolutionary movies, movies that showed the struggle of the people, and people used to watch them with a lot of passion."

The restoration work in 2004 was overseen by the French architects Frederic Namur and Jean-Marc Lalo, and financed by an association led by French director Claude Lelouch, who won the Palme d'Or top prize at Cannes in 1966 for "A Man and a Woman".

French-Afghan writer and filmmaker Atiq Rahimi, whose first movie was shown at the Ariana in 2004, was heartbroken at the news.

"The Ariana cinema was not a ruin to be demolished, but a memory to be revived. It was already destroyed once by the civil war. This time, it's worse: it's being erased in the name of 'modernity'. A soulless modernity, without images, without shared silence in the dark," Rahimi told AFP from exile. 

When his movie was playing at the Ariana, "we believed, for a moment, that culture could survive barbarism. Razing a cinema is not building the future."

Another Kabul movie house, Park Cinema, has already been demolished, also to be replaced by a mall. 

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