Movie night in Kigali

Last weekend, on the Kigali City tour, the guide made a detour for us to show us where to find the city's only real movie theater, the CineStar. Actually that sentence reveals a lot about Kigali, namely:

1. Everyone is extremely kind and very proud of their city (hence the detour);
2. You have to be shown where things are, because they don't really have an address system here--basically you depend on people knowing where things by name, and if that fails, by landmarks and neighborhood names (really tough if you're new, your French is old, your Kinyarwanda nonexistent);
3. While some restaurants will project movies, this is the only actual theater in town (and most people you talk to insist there is no theater in Kigali, it's not well known for a number of reasons see below for some).

So on the city tour, we spoke to the theater manager and he showed us where the posters outside the theater are displayed and the show times are tacked up below the poster in the glass case on the second floor. We were there on a Sunday and there were 2 shows--one at 6 and one at 8. There is no listing in a newspaper, internet, etc., so we planned to come back and finished our tour.

Then last night (Saturday night) we returned to the CineStar at 6 for the early show, with our colleague who arrived just the night before and hadn't been out of the hotel much yet. When we got there, we found out that on Friday and Saturday, the shows are at 7 and 9, and that the shows playing were "Children of Men" and "Bride Wars" respectively. The 3 of us agreed that we really could not wait around for an hour to watch a very intense movie, so we opted to walk back to the hotel and have some drinks and desert on the hotel patio. Two other colleagues joined us for a while; when they left, we decided to return to the CineStar for the 9 o'clock show. We took the hotel's taxi (a Mercedes) and arrived at about 20 minutes of 9. We bought tickets (1,5oo Rwf, or just under $3) from the manager, walked about 5 feet, handed the tickets over to the ticket collector, and then was shown to our theater on the 3rd floor--the 2nd floor theater is apparently for VIP (?) which is only slightly confusing considering we had the whole 3rd floor theater completely to ourselves.

When we walked in, Michale Jackson greeted us on the big screen. It was Billie Jean, but the video was from the music award show when he debuted the moonwalk. We danced ourselves down to perfect seats and enjoyed a few more MJ videos--Bad, Liberian Girl, Smooth Criminal--all complete with English subtitles. It's somehow perfect that I had to travel to a different continent to learn that words to those songs. I think Michael would have wanted it that way.

Ann dancing to Billie Jean

Ann and Lumbe

So on with the movie. It is a projected DVD system, complete with copyright warnings and selection menu--I wonder if we could have requested to watch the special features? A few more people had filled in some seats behind us, but the theater was still largely empty. The movie itself was okay, made more ironic viewing the over the top opulence in such a setting. The experience itself and the company of my colleagues was the main attraction.