07 -- Newly Independent

I was eight when I started to go to the movies, by myself. There was a designated children film house just two blocks from my first home (possibly, a prewar building), granting me the freedom to go on my own.

The theatre itself was a hybrid of the times — the very raw beginning of the 1990s, around the crush of Soviet Union, Part 1. The ticket booth was cramped into the semi-basement of a red-brick gothic looking apartment house. For 10 kapeiki, you gained admission to a movie screened in the adjacent yellow soviet style building with a shop on the ground floor and randomly placed screening hall just above it.

Between these two buildings stood a wall with a poster of the current or upcoming film for local children, on a cusp of turning ex soviet. It was painted by hand — a relic of the time and place, and the only visual advertising. There was just one film to watch, and it changed every two weeks.

The only other communication material was a framed film program in A0. It announced the film titles for the coming two months. No pictures of any kind, just different colors of typeface varied from month to month and from film theatre to theatre — warm brown, grass green, salmon pink or magic purple. To my mind this was more than enough to make me want to see all the announced films. Even those rated 16+.

Those hand-painted posters and the 90s cinema (later brought to a living room via video tapes, across families who could afford a videoplayer) have stayed in me, like a window to a new world in my newly independent country.

Craft is technology
you just dont need a screen to look at it