In the bygone years of Socialism, the Oktyabrsky Palats convention hall next to the Khreschatyk metro station hosted Communist Party Congresses.
There, roughly once a year, bored speakers lectured on topics such as Dialectical Materialism to even more bored deputies, who responded at scripted intervals with 'prolonged, stormy applause'.
Today at the Kinopalats Ukrainy, as the Oktyabrsky Palats is now known, teenage girls sniffle as the unsinkable liner Titanic slides beneath the frigid waters of the Atlantic with massive loss of life, in glorious Technicolor, five times a day, matinees not included.
Who says there's no such thing as progress? 'My goal is to bring back the cinema to Ukraine,' said Kinopalats Manager Jean-Claude Tissot. 'The industry has completely died, people here don't go to films anymore.' An exaggeration, but a very slight one.
When the Soviet Union broke up, Ukrainian film making was in crisis: the industry suddenly had no money, actors and directors had to do their job in Ukrainian rather than Russian, video players became de-rigeur in upwardly mobile households, and mostly-pirated and therefore cheap foreign celluloid displaced stodgy domestic fare – long on conversation and short on action and special effects. The result was that Ukrainians stopped going to the movies. Tissot means to change that, and the Guadeloupe-born Parisian is not alone in his quest. In the lobby Willis, Bassinger, van Damme and Ford compete for wall space in life-size four-color prints. The video system (donated by Sony for a plug) airs coming attractions.
For tickets, see Olga Brazhiuk and Tatiana Prokopets. Beaming smiles trained and polished by Tissot's five years with Disney, the two young women explain pricing for the Kinopalats' 290 seats. Unlike in U.S. theaters where you pay at the door and sit where you can, at the Kinopalats you have a choice of seating, and prices.
Tickets cost Hr 6 ($2.94) for the cheapest seats, while the most expensive run Hr 35 ($17.15).
If the customer has special needs, Brazhiuk and Prokopets stand ready to assist.
'For romantic couples the best seats are in the back under the balcony,' Brazhiuk confided. 'It's darkest there.' That wasn't priority for Dmitry Tkach, who chose to purchase two Hr 20 ($9.80) middle section seats for the evening show. The 28-year-old appliance distributor sees Kinopalats as an interesting, and inexpensive, venue for a date.
'Sure I could watch Titanic on a (pirated) video,' he conceded. 'But this is a nice movie theater, so going here is pleasant for the ladies, who of course want to go out but do not always want to go to a restaurant.' 'Those seats will be fine,' confirmed Maria Belopolskaya, who accompanied Tkach and assisted in ticket selection. 'We'll see everything from there.'
Tissot and his partners – two Swiss private businessmen have bet a half a million dollars on the proposition that there are enough Tkaches and Belopolskayas and similar couples in Kyiv to make Kinopalats profitable. Besides the Disney outlook, which manifests itself in the sunny smiles of the Kinopalats staff, Tissot brings experience from his previous projects, the Studio and San Tori restaurants, and the Dynamo Luks disco. His goal from the physical side – to create a state-of-the-art movie theater – is fairly complete. The Dolby is in, the floors are carpeted, and the image on the screen is no more or less grainy than what one would see in developed countries.
Besides providing an alternative venue for dating couples, Kinopalats management hope their cinema will pull in crowds by showing new films unavailable elsewhere – apart from on pirate video, of course.
There is a precedent: the wildly successful Kodak Theater in Moscow, which has become not only a major money-maker but a site for Europe premiers for films by majors like Time Warner and Buena Vista.
The idea would be to do the same thing in Kyiv, although for the present if you see a film in the Kinopalats, it opened a week ago in Moscow and up to a month ago in the States.
'My friends say I am crazy to enter this project,' Tissot said. 'But the film distribution business can only grow, and the market here is completely empty and huge in size.' But before he can rake in the hryvnas, splitting the take with Columbia from an international first screening of the latest De Niro opus, Tissot has to cover cost and generate a profit. That will be done the old-fashioned way: with concessions.
A full range of artery-clogging and certainly non-healthy movie fare is already available to the Kyiv general public: pop corn (boxes, not tubs), soft drinks, beer and hot dogs. Nachos and more traditional Ukrainian butterbrods are a coming attraction, as is a full bar.
'We are in Russia,' explained Tissot, speaking in cultural rather than strictly geographical terms. 'When people here go out, they expect to be able to drink. If we want them to come here, we have to give them what they want.' Other cash-generation plans include a summer cafe, an English-language feature once nightly, price breaks for seniors, and midnight movies.
But on a Wednesday afternoon the audience – some forty teenagers – just wanted to sit in the dark and discuss the epic sinking unfolding before them on a massive screen with sound track in Dolby (TM).
'Oh my God!' exclaimed one young woman, unaccountably on leave from her afternoon studies, as the Titanic rammed into a wayward and fateful iceberg off the coast of Nova Scotia.
'It's only a model,' said her companion.
In spite of light hooky-hour attendance, Tissot is pleased with results.
'Our figures are pretty much on track,' he said. 'Not too much during the day, close to full houses in the evenings … We hope to be making money here in three months.'
