Remains of what once was Cine Apolo, on rua Conselheiro Nébias, 211, in a photo shot in March 2019.
29 October 1961 - At the same week Alfred Hitchcocks's 'Psycho' and John Wayne's 'The Alamo' premiered in Sao Paulo, Ruben Biáfora, OESP's columnist hailed 3 new Japanese releases.
Cine Apolo, opened on 7 February 1961, on Rua Conselheiro Nébias, 211, showed a Shochiku Film Festival in October 1961, with 7 different flicks: Heinosuke Gosho's 'Sonho disperso'; Keisuke Kinoshita's 'A parede invisível' and 'Nas asas da fantasia'; Hideo Ohba's 'Poesia do meu primeiro amor' and 'Orvalho na flor' plus Tatsuo Sakai's 'Acorrentados pelo amor'.
Once, after visiting my friend Ricardo Augusto Hipólito, who lived in a flat of a building on rua Aurora where Cine Aurea occupies the ground floor - we actually went down the lift together and when we turned rua Conselheiro Nébias, I noticed a peculiar parking lot which I immediately thought it had been either a theatre or a movie-theatre. I asked some people around it but no one knew anything about the past of that parking lot so I ended up letting the subject drop.
Ricardo died tragically on 2nd January 2014, so I never went back to that region again - that is until a few years later when I started researching the Archives of newspaper 'O Estado de São Paulo' and came across this article about a Japanese movies festival held at a certain Cine Apolo, on rua Conselheiro Nébias, 211.
Immediately the image of that parking lot came back to my mind and I made a point of going back there with a camera and try to photograph the place. And that's what I did on a day in March 2019. And here are the photos I took on that day.
former Cine Apolo, on rua Conselheiro Nébias, 211 was turned into a parking lot.
former Cine Apolo's front on a photo taken in March 2019.
Former Cine Apolo seen from inside looking toward the entrance. The huge building in the background was where Ricardo Hipólito used to live up until the last days of 2013.
this window on the right might as well have been Cine Apolo's projection cabin.
3 sets of rollup doors 1940s style... just like the ones they had at Cine Marília, built in 1941.
5 decorative pieces on the left wall of Cine Apolo still shows images related to movies.
California or Mexican landscape so common in Western movies; a cinematographer in action...
the figure holding a cane is beyond me; a movie director ready to shout 'cut'!
Cine Apolo was probably built to be a Western movie house...
