Rising from the ashes: Capri Cinema
Think of this story as a sequel to a blockbuster. One whose preceding part dangled on a cliffhanger.
We know the characters. We’re familiar with the backstory. The protagonist is a hollow shell, beaten, burned and betrayed by its own. It is not a pretty sight.
Capri cinema, one of Karachi’s leading single screen film cinemas, was torched by an angry mob on 21st September. It was not the only one, though. Eight other cinemas, five in Karachi and three in Peshawar, shared the same fate.
A few paces to down the road, Capri’s neighbor, Prince Cinema, already closed to public out of a legal action, saw a harder throw-down. Nishat Cinema, the bigger brother of the Cine-lane at M. A. Jinnah Road, and the first child of Mandivwalla Entertainment, owners of the lush four-screen Atrium Cineplex, was murdered in cold blood. A lane to the left, Bambino Cinema, also torn down, patched itself up a little too quickly — it was a fighter.
Capri, however, took a brief breather to gather its strength. The cinema plans to opens its doors to the public two or three weeks from now — reborn more resilient, but inside the same shell.
I visited Capri several times during its painful restoration. Farrukh Rauf, director of Capri cinema and Aziz Khattak, general manager and the chief taskmaster of Capri’s scheduled resurgence, have always been accommodating, regardless of natural working hours.
“Our plan is to open Capri by December 7, and if delayed, by December 15,” Rauf said.
The opening, he said, is going to coincide with the Akshay Kumar's Khiladi 786, which he says will be a “full-on entertainer”.
In case of construction delays, their next opening window will be with Salman Khan’s Dabaang 2, a week later.
Right now though, there are flakes of wood-work all over the floor as three men mend furniture in a corner. A man balances himself like a tight-rope trapeze artist — only his drop is a three and a half-feet; this man is painting the roof. Periodically, the walls echo the thunder of Thor’s hammer. The booming sound is secreted away from what my eyes see. Its continued timbre, however, has the aura of an old storyteller.
“The incident happened in September, and we started reconstruction from mid-October, I think somewhere around the 15th,” Rauf said. “For the first 15 days after the incident, we didn’t touch anything. We were waiting for the government response, and people wanted to see what happened to the cinemas, so (after a while) we opened ourselves to let the public see what happened. When nothing happened from the government's — or from anyone else’s end — we had no option but to start work on our own by borrowing money from (our) stakeholders”
As I walk through the familiar curving corridor with Mr. Rauf, there’s a gargantuan wooden appendage clutching the main cinema hall. A few high-powered lamps shine the scene for the workers;the dramatic ambiance, a nice after-thought, is an improve that just happened.
Talking about the cost of reconstruction, Mr. Rauf said that “(we) are expecting about 5 million in repairs and another 5 million from business losses”. As far as profit goes, “it’s going to take about six months to cover the losses. Up until then, it’s going to be a no-profit game”, he said. Coming out of debt would take a year if the business is good.
As expected, no government encouragement came to help.
“We held various press conferences, asking the government for support, urging them to setup a commission to investigate the incident, access damages, and accordingly, consider earmarking compensation or (maybe) announce incentives.” Rauf said. “But unfortunately, nothing happened.”
He admits that the media played a preeminent role in evoking a response. Celebrities were horrified.
“Mustafa Qureshi, Sangeeta exclaimed full support, citing that these cinemas were the backbone of (the film fraternity),” he said. “If these cinemas went out of existence, it would be an irrecoverable damage to the already suffering cinema industry.”
Rauf said Ajab Gul did a press conference and visited the damaged sites requesting the same thing from the government that he did.
“Financial support was nil. Absolutely zero,” he said. “This charity was, like everything else, restricted to lip service.”
We continued my tour, and he and Mr. Aziz, showed me some old speakers jutting from low-ceilings where people with Rs. 200 tickets would sit. “We are going to replace all of them” Rauf pointed. He had already shown me a prototype of the new chairs. Although not of high-end multiplex quality, these new chairs would be sturdier with better cushions then the ones that were eaten up by the fire.
“We are upgrading the quality of the sound and the picture and the overall comfort of the audience,” he said. “We’re also beefing up the security of the cinemas with “internal (security) cameras, a walk-through security booth (and) metal detectors, so that the audience would feel comfortable inside the cinemas,” he said.
