Labia to keep its old world charm as it joins digital age

CAPE TOWN’S charming “old school” cinema will live to see another day, thanks to a continuing Thundafund crowdfunding campaign that has raised close to R250 000 of its goal of R2 million.

Owner Ludi Kraus took the Cape Times behind the scenes of the 65-year-old Labia Theatre on Orange Street.

He said his love of film dated from the days when he worked during school holidays in his father’s cinema, The Alhambra, in Windhoek. “I developed a passion for it. It gets into your blood,” he said.

When he bought the Labia in 1989, it was a “dark” and “dingy” theatre-and-cinema combo, a mix that “did not work well”.

He set to work, converting this, a rehearsal room, a backstage area and garage into four theatres, each with a screen.

During his 25 years there he has upgraded and maintained the appeal of the property, added a “lekker coffee bar” and terrace, and hosted an array of independent productions, modern films, classics, and film festivals.

Screen One is where the original theatre was, with chairs that have been in use since 1949.

Kraus said the Labia needed a rejuvenation of technology and perhaps a lick of paint here and there, but he had no intention that it should lose its old world charm or ambience.

Key to the rejuvenation was that, to save the Labia from going “dark”, digital was the “only way”.

Fewer films were available on celluloid and most modern films were digital. Also, components for the old projectors were no longer available. All this meant money had to be raised for the Labia to enter the digital era, Kraus said.

One of his dad’s old projec- tors from the Alhambra, in use at the Labia for 25 years, stands next to a borrowed digital projector in Screen One’s projection room. Kraus said it would be placed proudly on display.

The purchase of three new digital projectors, which he hopes can be achieved through the crowdfunding campaign, would “open a whole new world”.

Screen Two, with only 51 seats, will continue to show films available on celluloid, DVD or Blu-ray, and facilitate independent screenings and festivals.

Kraus said he had accepted the change, but he loved the nostalgia of the imperfection of celluloid film, the beam of light and the sound of the old projectors. He said he had to quote Bob Dylan: “The times they are a changin’… and you have to move with the times.”

See www.thundafund.com/ thelabia.