Travelling though Angola, you can be certain that in almost every town or city that you pass through you’ll find an old building that was once a cinema. It was a tradition among the Portuguese to frequent the cinemas. The movie would be screened for a few weeks before being exchanged for one from another town. Sometimes people watched the same movie several times for the sake of socialising. According to an article in the digital magazine ‘The Spaces’, by 1970 there were 50 cinemas for a population of 5.9 million people. Not just serving as places to watch the latest film, they were vibrant meeting places for the local communities.
I had seen many of the crumbling, abandoned Cine buildings and asked a friend about them. He enlightened me about the Portuguese cinema culture and took me to see, what he called, the most beautiful cinema, in Moçâmedes (formerly Namibe). It stood out from the rest with its bold, curvaceous architecture, a giant leap from the more sedate, formal cinemas of yesteryear.
Designed by Botelho Vasconcelos of Atelier Boper, ‘Cine Estudio Namibe’ was nicknamed ‘the spaceship’ and inclu
ded a restaurant and shopping area. The 600-person cinema, however, never screened a movie. When Angola gained its independence in 1975, the construction stopped and the building was abandoned over the next three decades of civil war.
When we visited, a caretaker named Placido, employed by the Moçâmedes municipality, showed us around. I wandered through the interior, marvelling that such an audacious building was planned as a cinema and appreciating the fact that even if it was never used for its initial purpose, it was now a major tourist attraction in the city.
I recently heard that the building had undergone renovations for an ‘Expo-tour’, the largest tourism and business fair in southern Angola, marking the 175th anniversary of the city. It took place at the beginning of August. ‘Cine Estudio Namibe’ had finally come into its own.