Kabul, Afghanistan., The crisp 1960s-style lines of the Ariana Cinema marquee stand out above a congested roundabout in downtown Kabul. For decades, this historic movie theater has entertained Afghans and witnessed Afghanistan’s wars, hopes, and cultural changes.
Now the marquee is stripped of the American action and Bollywood movie posters that used to adorn it. Its doors are closed.
After regaining power three months ago, the Taliban ordered the Ariana and other rooms to stop working. Islamic militant guerrillas-turned-rulers say they have yet to decide whether to allow movies in that country.
Like the rest of Afghanistan, Ariana is in strange limbo, waiting to see how the Taliban will rule.
The nearly 20 movie theater employees, all men, still show up for work, logging in in the hopes that they will eventually get paid. The famous Ariana cinema, one of four in the capital, is owned by the Kabul municipality, so its employees are government workers and remain on the payroll.
Men pass the hours. They hang out at the abandoned locker room or stroll through the twisting hallways of the theaters. Rows of plush red seats fill the silent darkness.
Ariana’s director, Asita Ferdous, the first woman in charge, is not even allowed to enter the venue. The Taliban ordered government employees to stay away so as not to mix with the men, until they determine if they will be allowed to work.
There was no jiyab or gender segregation
During their previous period in power, from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban imposed a radical interpretation of Islamic law that prohibited women from working or going to school or even leaving the home in many cases and forced men to grow up beard and attend prayers. They banned music and other arts, including movies and cinema.
Under international pressure, they now say they have changed, but have been vague about what they will or will not allow. This has put the lives and livelihoods of many Afghans on hold. For Ariana, it’s another chapter in a tumultuous six-decade story.
The movie theater opened in 1963. Its elegant architecture reflected the modernizing spirit that the then ruling monarchy was trying to bring to the deeply traditional nation.
Kabul resident Ziba Niazai recalled going to the Ariana in the late 1980s, during the Soviet-backed government of President Najibullah, when there were more than 30 cinemas across the country.
For her it was an entrance to a different world. She had just gotten married and her new husband brought her from her hometown in the mountains to Kabul, where she had a job at the Ministry of Finance. She was alone in the house all day while he was in the office.
But when I got off work, they used to go to the Ariana together to see a Bollywood movie.
After years of rule, it was an era more secular than recent decades, at least for a narrow urban elite.
“We didn’t have jiyab at the time,” said Niazai, now in her 50s, referring to the headscarf. Many couples went to the movies and “there wasn’t even a separate section, you could sit wherever you wanted.”
At that time, war broke out across the country as the Najibullah government clashed with a US-backed coalition of Islamic warlords and militants. The mujahideen overthrew him in 1992. They then fought a power struggle that demolished Kabul and killed thousands of people caught in the crossfire.
The Ariana was severely damaged, along with most of the surrounding neighborhood, in frequent shelling and shootings.
It lay abandoned in ruins for years, when the Taliban drove out the Mujahideen and took over Kabul in 1996. The surviving cinemas around Kabul were closed.
Help to rebuild it
Ariana’s resurgence came after the Taliban were ousted in the 2001 US-led invasion. The French government helped rebuild the cinema in 2004, part of the flood of billions of dollars of international aid it tried to reshape. Afghanistan for the next 20 years.
With the disappearance of the Taliban, cinema experienced a new burst of popularity. Indian movies were always the biggest draw at the Ariana, as were action tapes, particularly those starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, said Abdul Malik Wahidi, in charge of tickets. As Afghanistan’s national film industry revived, Ariana screened a handful of Afghan films produced each year.
They had three screenings a day, ending in the middle of the afternoon, at 50 Afghans a ticket, about 50 cents on the dollar. The audience was overwhelmingly male. In the conservative society of Afghanistan, cinemas were seen as a masculine space and few women attended.
Wahidi recalled how he and other staff members had to preview all foreign films to rule out those with scenes deemed too racy, with couples kissing or women showing too much skin, for example.
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