From Ciudad de México to Bucharest, we’ve traveled far and wide to come up with a list of the most interesting cinemas from around the world, recommended to us by filmmakers and critics alike. Recommendations from: Bianca Oana, Flavia Dima, Cristian Mungiu, Victor Morozov, Marius Olteanu, Irina Trocan and Vlad Petri.

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La Pagode, Paris, France

A colonial monument to passionate love, La Pagode in Paris is a two-hall cinema that has a Japanese garden and was built in 1895 on the Rue de Babylon (!) by the store manager of the Bon March chain, as a wedding gift for his wife, whom he divorced shortly afterward. It’s furnished with materials, colors, and decorations that are typical of 19th century Japan, and make you feel as if you’re in a Mizoguchi film. The sense of being in a film is there from the moment you enter through the gates of a cinema, like in a mise en abyme. In 1979, The Ministry of Culture granted the building the status of a historical monument, imposing the obligation for it to remain a cinema. Unfortunately, after a dispute over unpaid rent and repairs between the owners and distributor Etoile Cinemas, the Pagode closed on 10 November 2015. The last films to screen there were Youth, in Hall 2, and a French film, Marguerite, in the Japanese auditorium. This is where I saw Whiplash, a few months before it closed down. (Bianca Oana)

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Cineteca Nacional, Ciudad de México, México 

Mexico is – par excellence – the land of monumentalism: and this is perhaps the most emphatic and visible cultural inheritance from the Aztecs. So, it should come as no surprise that its Cineteca Nacional, founded in 1974, is a temple to cinema in every sense of the word. With ten screening rooms, two open-air screens, multiple libraries, cafes, restaurants, exhibition spaces, and research centers that bring in thousands of visitors a week, the imposing modernist building in the neighborhood of Coyoacan (joined by two more: Cineteca de las Artes, in Churubusco, and an upcoming one in the historic Chapultepec park) host what is most likely the most popular cinematheque on earth, an enormous beating heart – Que viva México, que vive el cine!  (Flavia Dima)

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Cinema Palas, Brussels, Belgium

Owned by the Dardenne brothers, this cinema is a good example of how a cinema should be remodeled effectively. In short: it’s centrally located, the building is lovely, also has a rich history, and after refurbishment, the cinema has a large theater with Dolby Atmos 7 sound, plus three smaller screening rooms and terrific programming, showing new and old, arthouse and mainstream films alike. The team strives to constantly bring in filmmakers and actors and to build an audience with whom they communicate constantly. The building also has a rentable exhibition space, and a restaurant rented out to third parties, but just so it doesn’t seem all roses – it’s worth mentioning that even in their case, it took about 20 years to implement the project as it is now, and it depended on which mayor was in power in Brussels. Some pushed the project forward, others shelved it, and so on. (Cristian Mungiu)

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Cinema Le Méliès, Grenoble, France

For the moment, I will skip the inevitable Cinémathèque Française – the place where it all began – to talk about the “Le Méliès” Cinema in Grenoble, a place that has remained in my memory as alive and bright as a refuge, even when so many other things have changed. “Le Méliès” consists of three auditoriums, christened and arranged according to a film: of course, “Le Voyage dans la Lune” is the largest, followed by “Le Nouveau Monde” (after Terrence Malick) and “En attendant le bonheur” (Abderrahmane Sissako). In all three, the screen is huge, and in the main auditorium, every chair is named after a director. “Le Méliès” is very dedicated when it comes to its young and very young audience, with a weekly program centered around cinema education and a selection that highlights animation films. But it’s more than just that: from the chic restaurant in its hall to the poster shop, “Le Méliès” has gathered a community around it, one for whom cinema literally is a chance to go out into the world. (Victor Morozov)

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Cinema Corso, Bucharest, Romania (and then a few more)

I thought about the cinema city that is the Cineteca Nacional in Mexico, then to the most beautiful open-air cinema – Fort Mare from Herceg Novi, Montenegro, then to the la Cinemateca Portuguesa, for which I have an unparalleled affection. I’ve been through many halls, memories, and films, until I went to the Cinema Corso in Bucharest to the sight of a cramped hallway in which, after the screening of Oana Giurgiu’s Aliyah DaDa, about 30 people stayed behind for over an hour to discuss what they had just seen. It was so cold inside that the air would get foggy whenever we spoke, and a feeling of an end was floating in the air. Everyone was wearing their coats and beanies inside, and the cinema’s personnel looked like they came out of the early 1990s. I felt that that was the last film that I’d see there – and I ended up being right about it. (Marius Olteanu)

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LantarenVenster, Rotterdam, Holland

The Rotterdam International Film Festival has what is known as “sandwich programming” – and not in the sense that you eat on the run between films, although that also tends to happen. It shows art or avant-garde films between two “slices” of films that are more likely to get the Dutch and the tourists out of their homes, in the idea that it opens up their horizons – that they might as well venture to see a low-budget Thai film if they’re there, and couldn’t catch tickets to the latest Ari Aster or Park Chan-Wook movies. Although it also plays niche films in multiplex cinemas, LantarenVenster is the cinema for the most experimental of festival experiments: structural films, a carte blanche for formally demanding documentaries, maybe even – sometimes, believe me, they did dare – medium-length films. Anyone venturing out need only leave the main festival area and, with some luck, catch an IFFR minibus there. Otherwise, they have to walk half an hour and cross a long, heavily trafficked, wind-shaken bridge (I still remember my beanie flying off my ears, so maybe that’s why no one wears them over there). Now, IFFR is between editions, LantarenVenster is far away and my auto-translate displays its website in Romanian with dubious accents, as if to intentionally make it less familiar. I remember, however, the films that I saw there many years ago, even if their stakes were to seemingly surprise you then simply vanish in front of your eyes, leaving you confused in the darkness of the cinema. (Irina Trocan)

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Kino International, Berlin, Germany

The cinema that I get the most emotional about is the Kino International in Berlin. It’s where I first felt that film is respected at its true value. The place where I connected best with what was being seen and heard. The first curtain is pulled, the programmer who presents the film comes on stage, then silence, the lights are turned off, and then the second curtain opens up, revealing the unusual and charming appearance of the screen – all this has had an amazing contribution to the experience, together with the enormous size of its screen and its impeccable sound system. I remembered the cinema of my childhood, the Dacia in Bistrița, where the curtains, together with the sound of the projector and reel assured me that something important was about to happen. Theater… Cinema… Spectacle. At the Kino International, I felt close both to the atmosphere of my beloved childhood cinema and to the film, as a spectacle. (Vlad Petri)

Redacție

An article written by the magazine's team