Two Tunisian cinemas, the Amilcar and Ciné Jamil, closed their doors in March.
The single-screen, 211-seat Amilcar, which opened in 2015 near the Tunis-Manar university campus, closed down on March 13th. The Ciné Jamil, on the outskirts of Tunis in the Menzah 6 district, closed soon afterwards. According to Ciné Jamil’s team they closed because of “significant financial difficulties” caused in part by the successive closures imposed during the Covid pandemic. Indeed Ciné Jamil has been “temporarily” closed since May 1st 2022.
Talking about this on Mosaïque FM, Ciné Jamil’s manager Ali Soula deplored the lack of public subsidies for modernizing local cinemas. In a Facebook post the Amilcar management invited “the competent authorities and particularly the Ministry of Culture to consider the problems facing cinemas very seriously.”
Currently, as an article in Nawaat points out, public subsidies are increasingly restricted. The whole film industry deplores the cuts to the bilateral aid fund for Franco-Tunisian co-productions and to the cinema investment fund, criticising as well the smaller number of subsidized films.
Sources: Box Office Pro, Kapitalis, Nawaat
