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Edward Theatre is a very special cinema. Over one hundred years old, it is one of the last independent film theatres in Mumbai. For decades it was run by a German and now, Europe is coming back to Edward. By Pronoti Datta

Those who follow Mumbai’s cultural calendar would have been startled to notice foreign films being screened at Edward Theatre every Thursday. That’s as incongruous as, say, finding filet mignon on the menu of Shiv Sagar or listening to a Bach recital at Razzberryy Rhinoceros. After all, Edward, which fits snugly between the Udupis and textbook shops of Kalbadevi Road, is a firmly working-class cinema hall that screens dated Hindi films. The posters outside the ticket booth at the moment are of films like Kashmir ki Kali, Zaalim and Daud. However two weeks ago, Wolfgang Becker’s German film Good bye, Lenin! was screened at Edward and last Thursday Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless was shown.

The public screenings are part of a certificate course called City Narratives in Literature and Cinema, which is being run by Majlis, a two-pronged organisation that promotes the arts and also deals with legal advocacy for disadvantaged women and the arts, SNDT Women’s University and Max Mueller Bhavan (Goethe-Institut).

There are several reasons for the unlikely choice of Edward. For Marla Stukenberg, the director of Mumbai’s Max Mueller Bhavan, the theatre forms part of her first impressions of the city. Soon after arriving in Mumbai in 2008, she watched a documentary at Edward on Gertrud Bharucha (nee Binz), a German woman married to Bejan Bharucha, whose family ran the theatre from the 1930s. The Bharuchas had leased the property from the owner, who migrated to Pakistan after Partition. Gertrud, who died in September 2005, was credited with ensuring that the cinema remained unchanged and served the working class population of the area. Even today, the most expensive ticket is just 28 Rupiah (46 cent).

“I was struck by this strange kind of morbid beauty that theatre has,” Stukenberg says. “I learnt it is one of the few stand-alone cinema screens in city. When the initiative began I remembered Edward and thought ‘let’s have screenings in an alternative space.’ It’s not really an alternative space, but to have screenings of foreign films is new. It seems Gertrud also defended this cinema. And I felt this is something special and needs some support because it’s part of Bombay’s history.”

Like a giant wedding cake

Majlis’ Madhusree Dutta describes the screenings as a “small guerrilla counter-act” against the disappearance of an entire cinema-going culture. “Old theatres are going away, there are more multiplexes, cinema is getting domesticated, nobody stores prints anymore,” she says.

In the midst of the homogenous tide of multiplexes, Edward has become quaint. The theatre was built in the mid to late 1800s and served as a venue for plays. Later it began screening movies. Bharucha’s nephew Burjor Poonawala recalls watching American films like Captain Marvel and Gang Busters as a child. Poonawala’s nephews now run the theatre. The modestly sized cinema hall is designed to resemble an opera house. There are three tiers – the stalls that still have wooden seats and two levels of balconies decorated with floral reliefs. On the sides are smaller balconies, like opera boxes. It’s like sitting inside a giant wedding cake.

The theatre is also a reminder of Indian cinema’s German connection. In the 1920s and ’30s, a handful of German directors and technicians worked with Indian cinemawallahs. Franz Osten collaborated with Himanshu Rai to make Prem Sanyas (1925), Shiraz (1928) and Prapancha Pash (1929). Osten became one of the first full-time directors of Rai’s production company Bombay Talkies and directed Acchut Kanya in 1936. Another German filmmaker who worked in India was Paul Zils, who joined Indian Films Information, which later become the Films Division.

“But for me that is an anecdote,” Dutta says. “We are talking about cityscape and Edward is part of cityscape.” The experiment seems to have succeeded. Stukenberg says that the two screenings have drawn a mixed audience – the art house crowd that one routinely finds at such events as well as Edward regulars. The hall was three quarters full for the screening of Godard even though it had been raining heavily the entire day.

Published with the kind permission of the Times of India, where this article appeared in early August.