In Tripoli, memory needs no map to find its way back to places that have long since vanished. There, on Al-Wadi Street, stood Cinema Lux, one of the most prominent screening venues that formed part of the city’s daily life throughout the 1960s. It was never merely a hall where films were shown. It was a social and cultural space, where stories converged and different eras crossed paths.
Today, nothing remains of that hall but a faint trace in the memory of those who once passed through its doors. It was converted into commercial shops and erased from the city’s architectural landscape, taking with it the details of an entire cinematic experience, a living testament to the memory of a whole generation.
This disappearance belongs to a wider context. Libyan cities, Tripoli and Benghazi among them, once hosted a flourishing network of cinemas: Al-Waddan, Catania, Rivoli, Qaabi, Al-Barnitchi, Al-Hurriya, Al-Nasr, and many more.
Following the political shifts that came after 1969, and particularly through the 1970s, cinema entered a period of steady decline. It was regarded at the time as an instrument of “cultural invasion,” leading to the closure of most screening halls or the transformation of their function. Despite scattered attempts to revive the sector, Libya still lacks modern, active cinema venues. Many of the old halls have been left derelict, demolished, or stripped of their cultural purpose entirely.
The Sound of Music
Cinema Lux was located on Amr ibn al-As Street, off the Wadi road. In its early years, the cinema catered primarily to foreigners, Italians in particular, during the period of Italian presence in Libya.
Historical sources indicate that most cinemas built before the Second World War were constructed by Italian investors. Cinema Lux itself is attributed to the Italian architect Antonio Cicciricco. The era of Italian colonialism (1911–1943) and its aftermath left a deep architectural imprint on Tripoli, with Italian engineers and designers behind many of the city’s landmarks, including Cinema Al-Waddan, Rivoli, and Catania.
Cinema Lux was distinguished by being both a screening hall and a theatre. It was considered one of the city’s finest winter venues, known for its cleanliness, its buffet service, and its reputation for screening major American films, among them The Great Escape and The Sound of Music.
Under the ownership of its founder, Hajj Suleiman Mustafa Al-Zani, Cinema Lux was spoken of in the same breath as the great cinemas of Cairo and Beirut. It screened the latest American releases within a month of their appearance in American theatres.
A Visual Pleasure
In Libya, cinema was never simply a screen onto which films were projected. It was woven into the rhythm of daily urban life. Along the city’s streets, screening halls lined up like great open windows onto the world, and Cinema Lux held its own distinguished place among them. Evenings were measured by the number of screenings. Stories took shape in the dark, while the light of lobby posters caught the eyes of those entering.
Cinema Lux was not so different from the other halls of its time, but like them, it offered the city moments of visual pleasure and opened doors onto distant worlds, from Cairo to Rome, from Bombay to Hollywood. As those halls dimmed their lights one by one, Lux remained, like all the others, a witness to an era when cinema was a part of life, not merely a memory to be recounted.
Professor Mustafa Al-Ghimari, a regular patron of the cinema, recalls: “Cinema Lux was known for its relative calm. A balcony ticket cost a quarter of a dinar. Before the main feature, a short cartoon would be shown, usually a beloved character like Mickey Mouse. That tradition was not just an opening act; it was part of a complete entertainment experience, especially for children and families.”
He adds: “Cinema Lux ranked second only to Cinema Al-Waddan. It had two halls: one on the ground floor and another upstairs. It was among the finest venues in Tripoli, with numbered seats and formal attire expected of its patrons. Opposite the entrance stood the Golden Eagle Hotel. At the beginning of the street was Cinema Al-Hamra, and before it, Mario’s Italian grocery, where you could find olives and cheeses. During the interval, you could buy light refreshments from Hajj Mukhtar’s buffet: a chilled Pepsi for five qirsh, chocolate with almonds for five qirsh, and a small bag of pistachios for the same.”
The Absence of Documentation
The disappearance of Tripoli’s cinemas was not merely the decline of a leisure activity. It was the disappearance of a memory that was never written down. As the years passed, halls that once buzzed with life, Cinema Lux among them, closed their doors and left behind only fragments of happiness in the recollections of their patrons: no precise founding dates, no records of the films that once played on their screens, not even enough photographs to adequately document their presence in the fabric of the city.
In the absence of archives, oral histories have become almost the only means of recovering that era: scattered accounts of crowded evenings, laughter rising in the dark, faces that came to know the world through a white screen. But this memory, however rich, remains fragile and vulnerable to erosion, bound as it is to individuals rather than institutions.
Here lies the paradox: a cinematic experience that extended across multiple Libyan cities now stands against a meagre documentary record, one that does not come close to reflecting its true scale.
The absence of an archive does not mean only the loss of information. It means the loss of an entire context through which social and cultural transformation might be understood. Cinema Lux was not merely a screening hall. It was a space for dialogue, a measure of the city’s openness to the world. When its documents disappear, so too does a part of the city’s own narrative.
This gap does not belong to Cinema Lux alone. It points to a deeper failure in Libya’s cultural archiving, documentation that has been weak or marginalised, whether due to the absence of dedicated institutions or the result of political shifts that reordered priorities at the expense of cultural memory. Cinemas declined, closed, and were converted into shops or abandoned buildings, without their history being recorded or their visual heritage preserved.
Oral memory has been left as the sole surviving source. And yet, as vital as it is, this memory remains fragile, subject to the passage of time and the loss of those who carry it.
The presence of places is not measured only by what physically survives, but by what has been preserved in memory and in documents. Today, the urgent need is to recover this archive: to collect testimonies, to search for scattered photographs, to document what remains of the memory of these spaces. Between what was, and what was never written, Cinema Lux stands as a quiet example of a memory that was never given the chance to endure.
Kholoud Elfallah
