ABU DHABI INSTITUTION ELDORADO CLOSES ITS DOORS AFTER 47 YEARS
▶ The men who built it can still remember the excitement of opening night, writes Anna Zacharias
After nearly half a century, Abu Dhabi’s first indoor cinema has shut its doors and switched off the pink and blue neon lights that brightened Electra Street for decades.
Eldorado, the Indian movie house named after a Beirut theatre, would have celebrated its 47th anniversary this week.
The men who built it can still remember when it opened its doors on November 22, 1970.
The city’s engineers, doctors and lawyers had all come to share that moment in Abu Dhabi’s history, dressed in their finery to watch Patton, the 1970 Academy Award-winning film about the American Second World War general.
Just as the audience settled down into their chairs, the power went out.
“Freddy. Freddy, where are you?” called a voice in the dark. It was Atef Karam, the cinema’s owner.
Ferdinand Lama came running. “There was sabotage done,” Mr Karam said. Three fuses had been stolen from the mains.
“Don’t worry,” said Mr Lama, the cinema’s air-conditioning engineer. “Get me nails.”
The nails did the trick, the power came back and the audience was enthralled.
The two met in 1969, a year after Mr Lama graduated as an engineer from the American University of Istanbul. Originally from Jerusalem, he had arrived from Jordan on the advice of his twin, Francois, who had moved to Abu Dhabi in 1967.
Before that, he knew Abu Dhabi only as “somewhere beyond Bahrain”. It was not a capital city yet. The UAE would not exist as a country for another three years.
Mr Lama was suspicious when approached by a Lebanese man with black sunglasses, but he was offered 300 Bahraini dinars to design the cinema’s air-conditioning system.
“I was wary of him,” Mr Lama said, “but he said there’s no risk. He always had cash, thousands of dinars. At that time they called it Bahraini dinars.
“And I said, ‘that guy is a wheeler dealer’, but he always had cash and he always paid on time.” He speaks of Mr Karam in the highest terms.
“He turned out to be a very correct person and he always had good films.”
Mr Karam came to Abu Dhabi in August 1968, two years after the accession of Sheikh Zayed as the emirate’s Ruler. One evening, while driving back to the Beach Hotel, his taxi got struck in traffic. It was an unusual occurrence in a city without many cars.
Getting out of his taxi, Mr Karam pushed past crowds blocking the street to find the cause of the commotion was an open-air cinema known as Al Mariah. It was a walled yard where Indian films were projected on a white wall after dark.
“I step inside and then I see that cinema with no screen, no ceiling, no seats,” Mr Karam recalls. “People were sitting on curtains and cases of Coca-Cola they’d turned upside down. Otherwise they would burn themselves on the sand because it had been absorbing the sun all day.”
Al Mariah was one of Abu Dhabi’s two open-air cinemas. Its rival, Al Andalus, played Iranian movies. Nobody screened Arabic or English films.
“I found that unruly crowd and I found the police with the batons, and that rang the bell,” Mr Karam says. “I went back to Lebanon and I sat with my father and I said, ‘We should open a cinema’.
“He said, ‘You know nothing about the cinema’. I said, ‘I’ll learn’.”
His father offered him half of the $1.8 million needed. The rest was funded by Abu Dhabi banks.
A member of the Otaiba family gave Mr Karam a 15-year lease on a plot far from the market, in an area of dust and sand.
“Why are you giving me a plot of land outside town?” Mr Karam asked him.
“No, no,” Mr Al Otaiba told him. “I know the town planning [department] and that place is in the middle of town.”
It would become the centre of Electra Street.
Mr Karam named his cinema Eldorado after the newest one on Beirut’s Hamra Street, which stood alongside the Piccadilly, the Versailles and the Saroulla.
He had come from Beirut during a golden age for Lebanese cinema, when the average person attended 22 times a year – second only to Hong Kong. Eldorado opened on his 27th birthday.
“It was a fantastic demonstration,” Mr Karam said. “It was the event of the year, not only the month or the week.”
For several months, everything went well and Mr Karam screened two or three English films a week, but trouble came after a 1971 screening of The Adventurers.
Its poster featured the silhouettes of stars Bekim Fehmiu and Candice Bergen in a hot embrace above the tagline, “Nothing has been left out”.
Mr Karam played the film in its entirety. No censor board existed in Abu Dhabi. The first screening went as usual. The second was a full house.
The third was for police and authorities, who had arrived on the second night demanding a midnight showing to review the film. It ran to nearly three hours and ended before the fajr prayer.
“They saw that film and they wanted to close the cinema for three days,” Mr Karam said.
He avoided having his cinema shut, but within a few days, a ruling banned films with nudity or violence. Mr Karam was then given his own censor.
In 1985, Mr Karam returned the land to Mr Al Otaiba. The cinema was demolished and rebuilt on the same plot.
In its second incarnation, Eldorado found new popularity with Bollywood films that played alongside English and Arabic billings.
“It was amazing because of the crowd,” recalls Sureesh Ushasree, the cinema’s manager. He came to Abu Dhabi in 1997, the year Titanic played for 75 days.
“I’m coming from Kerala, so it was a different culture with all people coming together and sitting and watching cinema. They like the dance and music of Indian cinema.”
Mr Ushasree had left his job as a pharmaceutical representative in Kerala to be Eldorado’s assistant manager on the advice of a friend, who told him: “The Gulf is crazy for Keralites.”
By 2000, cineplexes had opened across the country and Eldorado switched to Malayalam and Tamil movies. Its last show, the Malayalam blockbuster Villain, played on November 4 at 10.30pm.
“We can’t renew,” Mr Ushasree says. “There are no proper papers. There’s no chance of reopening.”
The owner has passed away and power of attorney had not been given, he said.
Business at the cinema had halved in the past two years. Mr Ushasree attributes this to its lack of an online presence and parking. Eldorado’s downtown location has ultimately proved its undoing.
Its six remaining staff will repatriate to India. “I’m going to be a farmer in Kerala,” Mr Ushasree says. “Vegetables and cows, goats.”
Mr Lama and Mr Karam continue to work in the UAE, decades after the Eldorado helped to launch their careers here.
“I discovered that they needed a cinema and I was lucky to be the first,” Mr Karam said. “It was a beautiful thing.”
I discovered that they needed a cinema and I was lucky to be the first. It was a beautiful thing ATEF KARAM Eldorado founder