COVID could shut down colonial movies in Indian Himalayan town | Cinema Stories

Shahi Theater is the last remaining film in Shimla, on the Himalayan mountain range that was once a refuge for Britain and India.

With its old soundtrack project and a beautiful balcony, Shahi Theater is the last movie left in Shimla, on the Himalayan summit which was a hot summer in Britain India.

But like so many other movie theaters that swept across the globe, it could hardly have been the last.

Originally built as a stadium in Britain, where all colonial officials could be warmed by the summer heat in the valleys due to the cold mountain climate in the north.

Local owner Sahil Sharma said his grandparents bought the house and turned it into a British theater after he left 1947, at a time when three other urban areas were too expensive for ordinary people.

“In those days we had a British heritage that people could not walk in the evenings without proper clothing,” Sharma told AFP.

“The common people and the poor did not have a place to show a movie.”

Shimla was a well-known place in the decades after his independence and his videos garnered the attention of prime ministers and celebrities as people flocked to see recent Bollywood shows.

Ashok Kapoor, 69, who started working at the Ritz Cinema closed down as a teenager and became a manager.

He was there, Kapoor said, because elsewhere in Shimla the leaders of India and Pakistan were meeting to resolve their differences after a brief international conflict last year, in the war for independence in Bangladesh.

In this photo taken on August 29, 2020, a staff member washes the chairs at the Shahi Theater in Shimla [Money Sharma/AFP]

Satish Kumar, an old man who has been working in Shahi for 50 years, says the fast-growing black market for tickets used to get the rows around the stadium.

But, he adds, the business has been “really bad over the last few years”.

Shimla has lost its old beauty as the locals have grown and the town has always been mountainous, although the main road – The Mall – still retains its old shopping center.

In the last few decades filmmakers have moved to a number of cities with a variety of townships, spinning machines, and many cinemas.

This has been read across the country, with thousands of pre-selected old movies that have kept crowds locked behind their doors in recent years.

Only two Shimla films were left last year but after India joined the group, the Ritz won again.

Movie theaters were only reopened last October but were forced to close again in April after new COVID cases that exacerbated last year’s explosion.

“We do not know the future of our corona,” says Sharma, fearing that the audience in their homes with the plague has completely changed their online viewing habits.

“We don’t even know if people would still want to come to the movies.”