From Caligula to Selling Sofas

Film producer Andrey Manuilov grew up near Tselinny. When he was five, his mother took him to Tselinny to see Starman.

“My mother became my guide to the world of American cinema, she loved it and passed this love on to me. I got excited, went to see Flight of the Navigator every day — this went on for several days. Then the same thing happened with Short Circuit — it was crazy. I went to morning shows for 10 kopecks, and then to evening shows for 50. I remember watching Italian film Il Bisbetico Domato all alone in the theater. Later in life, I learned that some scenes were deleted. I liked this movie anyway, no matter how much I was carried away by American cinema at the time. And with my parents I went to Tselinny to see Intergirl, Gone with the Wind, Rambo (First Blood), Jaws, King Kong, and others.”

Once his curiosity was tickled, Andrey started renting movies from video stores. At some point, he found out that Tselinny also offered VCR options in a small room next to the cash register.

Robocop was Andrey’s last childhood big screen experience. Once film distribution fell apart, TV replaced movie theaters: “We saw every movie on the TV screen, mostly pirated copies of films. I think I didn’t go to a movie theater for 7-8 years.”

One Film for a Whole City

One of the projectionists at Tselinny recalled that in the 1990s they had to show the film Caligula almost around the clock, because that was the only one the audience would see. They tried to show more intellectual films, but no one was interested in them.

Movies somehow managed to get onto the screen, but they would not draw the same crowd. Somehow, cinemas continued to operate, sometimes to the point of whimsical tales. As Maira Kubaniyazova, who worked at Tselinny, recalls, different cinemas sometimes had to share one reel.

"There was a time when we only had one film for the whole city. For example, Predator or Robocop. And we showed it in several cinemas at the same time. While one reel was playing in this cinema, we were taking another reel to another. Each reel fit 40-50 minutes of a movie. We shared the reels among Tselinny, Alatau, and Arman. There were no traffic jams back then. If the car broke down, you had to grab this reel and run to the cinema, because the audience was waiting. And reels are heavy," Kubaniyazova told Vlast.

With the collapse of the USSR, technicians were asked to work longer hours, from 9am until the end of the sessions. In Soviet times, shifts were standardized: From 9am to 6pm, and from 5pm until midnight. In the 2000s, technicians worked all-day shifts for two consecutive days and then had two days of rest.

Sermons in the Cinema

Even when there were no films to show on the big screen, the cinemas were not empty. Maria Lobacheva, who now works for the non-governmental organization ECHO, grew up near Tselinny, and said she spent her entire childhood in the cinema. One day, however, she stumbled upon an unexpected performance.

In the early 1990s, as she was walking by Tselinny, Lobacheva saw an announcement about a church holding a meeting in the movie theater, admission was free.

“We went into the movie theater out of curiosity, and the hall was full of people. The preacher and his assistants were on stage. The preacher was saying that the Holy Spirit would descend, and a couple of minutes later there was a crash, as if something heavy had fallen. My friend and I looked at each other and joked that the Spirit had come. But then we heard something falling again. People were falling, maybe in a fit of mass psychosis, or maybe they were actors. We sat there for about 40 minutes and left. There were no new films in Tselinny any more, and we stopped going there.”

Eurasia Film Festival

In the 1990s, cinemas became part of the “market economy.” On December 23, 1996, Tselinny was leased to the company Ibragimov Satirical Theater. In 1998, the company’s owner, Bauyrzhan Ibragimov, the former director of the Tamasha TV Theater, bought the cinema and shut it down for renovations.

In 1999, part of the foyer was leased to a furniture store, while the rest became a café, and the cinema hall was put up for rent for cultural events.

On October 4, 1998, the first Eurasia Film Festival opened in Almaty, attended by a range of directors and actors, from Michael York and Pierre Richard, to Nikita Mikhalkov and Barbara Brylska, from Vadim Abdrashitov to Chulpan Khamatova.

To hold a festival in such conditions seemed so unlikely that newspapers doubted until the very end that it would really take place. Initially planned as a traveling festival, the Eurasia Film Festival had good auspices, as it called: “For a common cinematic space!” The ‘nomadic’ idea behind the festival, however, never materialized, and it continued to be hosted in Almaty and later in Astana.

The first festival lasted 12 days with 78 showings across several cinemas in Almaty. In Tselinny they showed Cabaret and a new film with Pierre Richard: A Chef in Love. After the first edition, Eurasia would not be held again for years, until it resumed in 2005. This was an early sign that people missed going to the movie theater and watching films on the big screen.

New Tselinny

On March 1, 2000, Ibragimov’s company sold the building to Otau Cinema. According to the documents on the state of the cinema, the building had depreciated by 50%.

Almaz Maldybayev, now the CEO of the KinoPark Multiplex Cinemas chain, and then the director of the Otau Cinema chain, recalled in a 2015 interview with Forbes that film distribution resumed in 1998, after 10 years of oblivion. In a 2001 interview, Maldybayev had also noticed that businessmen focused on real estate, not cinema. “But they noticed the experience of Muscovites who revived their own cinemas, and this was a business that made money.”

The company also bought the Iskra movie theater from the state through a tender and invested about $1 million to restore the building and purchase equipment. After inaugurating Iskra, Otau Cinema quickly realized that it could gain from scaling up: within two years, the company bought from the government the theaters Alatau, Tselinny, Sary-Arka, and Baikonur. According to Maldybayev, the restoration of each cinema cost between $600,000 and $1 million.

Otau Cinema turned old movie theaters into modern ones, by providing them with new equipment, a smoother distribution, and a popcorn supply. People started coming back: in 2001, more than 60,000 tickets were torn per month at theaters operated by Otau Cinema. The company hoped that by 2005, its market potential would extend to one third of the population.

In the same 2001 interview, Maldybayev announced the purchase of Tselinny and the prospective construction of a two-hall multiplex with a restaurant and gaming rooms.

In previous months, the news of the opening of the renovated Tselinny had made the rounds, but the reconstruction was ultimately delayed. At one point in 2000, Vadim Sidorkin learned that his father’s sgraffito inside the cinema would be destroyed.

"I was there when they were tearing down the right side of the sgraffito to install a ventilation cable. I recorded it on camera. It was a big blow for me. I immediately called the director of the OYU gallery, Gulmira Shalabayeva, who was writing a monograph dedicated to my father. She made a few calls and renovation works were stopped. A large commission was created, including all our master artists, from Yerkin Mergenov to Shota Valikhanov,” Vadim Sidorkin told Vlast.

“The commission decided that if it was impossible to preserve the original for technical reasons, then it had to be recreated on the façade. They [Otau Cinema] resisted this decision, but we insisted. In the end, a copy was put on the façade. How they did it, that’s another story."

Many people mistakenly believed that part of Sidorkin’s sgraffito was “moved” to the building's façade, but that would have been physically impossible. The work was not a mosaic that could be removed and reassembled. It was artist Shaken Niyazbekov, the author of Kazakhstan’s flag and Almaty city’s coat of arms, who was in charge of making the copy of Sidorkin’s sgraffito.

In the book Alma-Ata: Architecture of Soviet Modernism: 1955-1991, architecture critics Anna Bronovitskaya and Nikolai Malinin compared this decision to an illustration from inside a book being used for its cover.

A renovated Tselinny opened at the very end of December 2001. But issues with soundproofing between the two halls immediately emerged and the cinema had to close for more renovations.

The cinema was split into two 322-seater auditoriums: the green and the red hall. The demand for movies allowed the cinema to show twice as many films. There was a need for a new entrance, which was envisioned through a second floor, that had to be specifically built. This led to the destruction of Sidorkin's sgraffito. The facade was also changed.

After this reconstruction, Tselinny got its former name back: the sign “Baurzhan-show” was removed and a new single-lettered sign was installed, without the traditional ear of grain that had come to symbolize the cinema.

Manuilov was at the opening of the new Tselinny.

“The inauguration featured director Eldar Ryazanov and they showed The Irony of Fate. Instead of one large hall, there were now two smaller ones. I was not disappointed, I was just glad that Tselinny existed again. It would have been painful for me if Tselinny, the cinema of my childhood, where I fell in love with movies, was torn down. The only thing I remember in the 2000s is the feeling that it had become smaller. At that time, I didn't quite understand the importance of the size of the screen and the hall. I cannot blame them, but the cinema became different. And unfortunately it did not last long, because there was another crisis.”

Patio Pizza

In 2003, Patio Pizza (a restaurant later renamed Il Patio) and Heaven (a club) opened inside Tselinny’s building. The owners of Otau Cinema were among the shareholders of Patio Pizza, a franchise of Russian company Rosinter. They also owned the American Grill Bar by the Alatau movie theater (which was also opened in 2001), where prices were initially in both tenge and US dollars.

"Opening a restaurant in Tselinny was a unique operation, because we received a wood-burning stove from Italy, and it turned out that it did not fit through the door. I was among the two dozen people that lowered the stove from above to the ground floor. We also had to use cables to install the refrigerators," recalls restaurateur Yuriy Negodyuk.

Restaurateur Dilmurat Zikryyarov worked as a manager at Patio Pizza, and recalls that the restaurant took a long time to get going because Masanchi Street was closed at the time: at the intersection with Kabanbai Batyr Street, it ended in a parking lot.

"When we were setting it up, some competitors came to us, looked at the surroundings, and asked: Who is your target audience? Grandmothers who go to church on Sundays?" recalls Zikryyarov.

The restaurant in Tselinny became popular in the summer of 2003, when their marketing offered a previously unheard-of promotion: a two-for-one pizza deal. This ensured that the place was always full on weekends.

The restaurant staff studied the film schedule, found out when major premieres were planned at Tselinny, and prepared in advance: they beefed up the staff, increased supplies, and held promotions. But at some point the cinema administration at Tselinny banned viewers from entering their halls with a pizza.

Tselinny by Night

In the first half of the 2000s, when oil prices were rising and easy money was pouring into the country, Tselinny once again became a hotspot. During the day, people watched movies in comfortable soft chairs, then ate delicious food in an Italian restaurant and drank coffee in Moka-Loka right in the lobby of the cinema, and at night, they went to the nightclub. And all this within the confines of one building. There was also a photo studio inside Tselinny, although it was mostly used by those who needed to give documents to the nearby police station.

The Las Vegas casino, the Altyn Biday beer hall, and the Samovar restaurant were all next to Tselinny. This intersection was a crossroads of different worlds: the golden youth and successful businessmen parked their expensive cars, right next to the city’s lower-middle class favorite spots. Life was in full swing, and Tselinny stood front and center.

The Heaven club, which had opened in the renovated Tselinny, became for many a symbol of the “fat” 2000s, that shone a light on Almaty’s nightlife. Promoters Ivica Golubovic and Sinisa Lazarevic, who came to the Heaven club from Moscow, brought real glamour to Almaty.

In 2004, in an interview with the newspaper "New Generation", Golubovic said that he knew what the spoiled, wealthy guests of the prestigious club wanted.

"When Heaven opened a year ago, it seemed to me that the entire Almaty crowd was ready for an exciting nightlife. I met many rich people who know how to live life to the fullest, how to dress beautifully and value good chats and relax. I was convinced that Almaty residents needed help to discover the joys of nightlife."

"Sinisa Lazarevich breathed new life into Almaty nightlife, this was the premium segment. People who considered themselves elite or wanted to be a part of it, hung out there. Heaven was the symbol of the worst: a culture of glamour and vanity. At the time, it seemed disgusting to me, but now I understand that it was inevitable. Unfortunately, it fit our Kazakh mentality perfectly: elite, vanity, glamour…,” DJ Nariman Isenov told Vlast.

“Success was powerful, this place instantly became the most popular right from the start. It had a solid interior, beautiful women, and rich men. This had a bad effect on club culture, people stopped appreciating clubs with good music. Instead of choosing My Town for the good music, they went to Heaven to make an appearance, look at others, everything else was showing off. I remember how Sinisa climbed onto the bar counter and showered everyone with champagne,” Isenov said.

The club lasted for three years, but gradually faded away. Every time someone tried to resurrect Heaven it never worked, its time had passed, people had become different.

Tselinny was as crowded as during Soviet times, until about 2005. Amantai Kusaiynbai, who began working at the cinema in the late 1990s, recalls that in the first years after reconstruction, students sat in the foyer from 10am. The last show had to end before midnight, because that was when Heaven opened its doors, right under the stands of the cinema hall.

After visiting the club once, architect Zhanna Spooner decided not to return there.

“It offended me so much that I boycotted it. I didn’t go back until 2018, when it became the Center of Contemporary Culture. The building was dangerous from a security point of view: they had shut the exit doors, which was dangerous in case of evacuation,” Spooner told Vlast.

The opaque façade was another mistake, according to Spooner.

"The entrance should be inviting, like a funnel. Reflective film repels people, it's like a wall. This is a basic feature in the psychology of architecture."

At that time, Otau Cinema was growing. It bought almost all cinemas in the city; only Arman, Kazakhstan and smaller ones like Mir and Sputnik remained outside its reach. In 2005, however, Otau Cinema, the main player in the market, sold the whole. Maldybayev said the reason was that the management thought the future belonged to multiplexes.

Indeed this was a far-sighted decision: shopping malls and entertainment centers mushroomed around the city, and each of them hosted a movie theater. This shift gradually killed off standalone cinemas.

Fewer viewers visited Tselinny after 2005. Heaven shut down after five years and it was replaced by a number of nightclubs, two of which focused on male striptease. The new owners of the building extended on the north side, opening at various times the eponymous Nightclub, a hookah bar, and the Sultan Pasha lounge bar.

The last person to rent the building was fashion photographer Yan Ray in 2015, who opened Tuyskan Bar. In an interview, he said that he felt something was wrong in this space and wanted to move the bar to another place. While he was looking for an alternative, the building was sold and he was asked to vacate the premises. The new owners had to remove the extension after an underground water leak.

Gradually, the former Otau Cinema network fell into disrepair.

Spooner argued that Tselinny’s decline was triggered by the many mistakes made both inside and around it. The areas around the building were turned into parking lots, which sealed the passage from the Nikolsky Bazaar to Baitursynov Street.

“If you block access around the building and create dead zones, then the building begins to die. Pedestrian paths were disrupted, blocked. One side of the building is blocked, the other has no room for pedestrians,” Spooner said.

In 2011, the chain put up for sale four of its cinemas. After a lengthy bidding process, Alatau and Tselinny were sold for $7 million each, Baikonur for $4 million, and Iskra for $3 million.

In 2015, businessman Kairat Boranbayev bought three movie theaters: Alatau, Baikonur, and Tselinny. Despite public opposition, the first two were demolished, to be replaced by McDonald's fast food restaurants, later renamed after the war in Ukraine began.

A Well-Hidden Surprise

Tselinny was luckier: it hosted the new Center of Contemporary Culture. In 2018, while the Center was preparing for the first project, a renovation unveiled a real miracle: Yevgeny Sidorkin’s sgraffito, once considered lost during the 2001 reconstruction, was still standing behind a plasterboard wall.

Yet, metal structures had been driven directly into the sgraffito, which “wounded” the masterpiece. Now, the Center of Contemporary Culture had to choose between trying to restore the panel or leaving everything as is, as a permanent reminder of a time when monumental art was concealed and destroyed.

On September 14, 2018, with the collaboration of Moscow-based Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, two exhibitions opened in Tselinny: the former cinema hall hosted the exhibition “Open Archive. Almaty”, which focused on Soviet modernist architecture. The exhibition featured unique documents, sketches, and even small surviving fragments of buildings, such as the golden features from the roof of the Palace of the Republic. Another exhibition, “On the Corner: City, Place, People”, showed contemporary art from Central Asia. The latter was held in the premises of the former nightclub. Its once chic glossy dark interior was surprisingly perfectly fit for the occasion.

For the first time since 2001, Sidorkin’s sgraffito could be seen through the glass façade. On top of the 2000s sign, the Center installed a copy of the original Tselinny sign from 1964. On the first floor, it was once again possible to buy tea, coffee and a sandwich. From there, it was easy to look out onto the street, at how a small stream of people was once again drawn to Tselinny.

The opening of the “new” Tselinny was attended by the business elite, leading architects, young urbanists, and officials. Mayor Bauyrzhan Baibek visited the premises twice.

After this, Tselinny closed for reconstruction, a feat that took longer than expected: first because of the COVID-19 pandemic, then due to the January Events, then in light of the investigation and trial of the building’s owner, Kairat Boranbayev.

Tselinny will soon open its doors again. This will be the topic of the next article.

To go back to the time when Tselinny was first planned and built, read this piece. To delve into Tselinny's best years, read this piece.

Осы мақаланың қазақша нұсқасын оқыңыз.

Читайте этот материал на русском.

This article is an edited translation of an article from a series of pieces published in partnership with Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture.