Before Kuwait had a single cinema, it had courtyards.
The Kuwaiti historian Dr Yacoub Al-Ghunaim dates the habit to the 1930s, when Kuwaitis who travelled to study or trade came home having seen films abroad. The first projector reached the country in 1936. A man with money bought a machine, cleared the courtyard of his house, and shops appeared that rented out reels and projectors to anyone who wanted them.
These were not private evenings. The owner left his door open, neighbours and relatives crowded in, and young men spent the early evening hunting for whichever house was screening that night. Soon some owners began charging: one rupee at the door. Renting a film and a projector for a single showing cost a hundred rupees.
When more people turned up than the courtyard held, the overflow was seated on the palm-frond canopies. The canopies were not built for it. They came down on the people below.
The films were mostly Egyptian and mostly romances — Ghazal al-Banat with Mohammed Abdel Wahab and Leila Mourad, Resala Gharam with Farid al-Atrash, Salama with Umm Kulthum. Egyptian stars were famous in Kuwait years before television arrived.
One detail explains why courtyard screenings continued long after halls opened: women were not permitted to go to the cinema. The courtyard stayed the only place where the whole family watched together.
It was the crowding, and the fights it caused, that pushed the merchants to organise. The Kuwait Cinema Company was formed — the company today dates itself to 5 October 1954 — and opened Al-Sharqiya, on leased land in Sharq near the Amiri Hospital.
It was a summer house in the literal sense: open to the sky in summer, roofed in winter with heavy canvas. It held about 1,500 people in three classes — 400 first-class seats at five rupees, 700 second-class at three, 400 third-class at two. It opened on 18 November 1955. The first Arabic film shown there was Aghla Min Aynaya; the first Indian film was Boot Polish; the first American one was Zarak.
The audience was not quiet. Al-Ghunaim recalls that a film people disliked was answered with empty bottles thrown at the screen, and that arguments with the public security men were routine. In May 1956 the seats, the projection equipment and the sound system were wrecked, and Al-Sharqiya shut.
The company opened hall after hall from there, running about eleven screens by the start of 1995. Its own site today lists nine locations, 74 screens and 11,119 seats.
A footnote on firsts: the earliest film shot in Kuwait had nothing to do with any of this. The Australian sailor Alan Villiers filmed Sons of Sindbad in 1939, a record of pearl diving made on a voyage from Aden to Kuwait by way of the East African coast and Zanzibar.
Sources: Kuwait News Agency, interview with Dr Yacoub Al-Ghunaim, 15 July 2012 — https://www.kuna.net.kw/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=2252825&language=ar ; Kuwait National Cinema Company corporate site — https://corporate.kncc.com/arabic-about-us.html
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