The 1910 Yafo Lens: Palestine's First Cinema

In 1910, the city of Jaffa saw the opening of its first permanent cinema, the 'Cinema Exprex'. This episode explores the social and political implications of early film culture in late Ottoman Palestine. How did the arrival of moving pictures intersect with a society already in flux—torn between Ottoman modernity, rising nationalist currents, and the first waves of Zionist immigration? Lucas and Luna discuss the cinema's location near the Jaffa Gate, the types of films shown (from Lumière actualities to Italian epics), the mixed-gender audiences that scandalized conservative clerics, and the role of cinema as a space where Arabs, Jews, and Europeans mingled uneasily. They also touch on the 1910 Jaffa fire that destroyed parts of the old city, the cinema's owner, a Greek Christian from Beirut, and the broader culture of public entertainment that included coffeehouses, shadow plays, and the newly arrived gramophone. This is a story not just of technology, but of the contested public sphere in a rapidly changing land.

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