Some old theaters in Gwangju.

I ended up visiting Gwangju Theater last week to check out a film in the Japanese Independent Film Festival from July 8th through the 22nd.

I took some pictures of the interior but they turned out poorly so I'll just save them for myself. It opened in 1934, making it the oldest theater in operation in Gwangju. It's worth a visit, not only because it's old and neat, but because they show all kinds of foreign movies. I ended up seeing Aruitemo aruitemo (Still Walking), staring Hiroshi Abe and Yui Natsukawa of the show "The Man Who Can't Get Married," now playing as a Korean remake "결혼못하는남자."

The theater itself is quite large, at five stories. There is only one screen, and two levels of seats. Naver says the capacity is 856, though there were fewer than 10 people in the theater at the time.

Walking around town that day brought me across other old theaters. I was killing time in an Angel in Us coffee shop when I noticed across the street the shell of the 신동아극장. It's on one of the main streets in downtown Gwangju, but I had never noticed the sign before because the side of the building is usually obscured by its neighbor.



The first two floors are currently occupied by an ABC Mart. The last film to be shown at the theater was 2004's "Anatomy of Hell" (지옥의 체험), and though the sign says it's not a porn film, Wikipedia does tell me that it's part of a "list of mainstream films with unsimulated sex."








Here's "Max Theater," known in Korean as 현대극장. It opened in the 1950s and closed in 2002.





Looking through the windows. There was a newspaper on the counter.

In an earlier post I also mentioned the 태평극장, which opened in 1957. I walked past it many times---it was on the corner near Migliore---and the last movie poster up was for Blade 3. When I passed it last fall it was gone, and remains to this day a parking lot.



Like I said in that entry on "Movie theaters in Gwangju," a local paper did a series last year on the city's old theaters. The easiest way to find them is to visit the 광주드림 website and search for "영화가 흐르던 자리."

I'll also mention that I used to keep track of movie listings for theaters in Gwangju and Suncheon because there were no resources available in English. However, the urls constantly change, making it really difficult to maintain the listings. Sometimes it's impossible to link directly to particular theater information. Your best bet will be to use "Korea Movie Times."

In other Gwangju news, there's a relatively new Arab restaurant that opened downtown. Gwangju is not only the Mecca of Kimchi Research, but indeed the Mecca of Arabs.