The old-time cinema experience endures in a quiet corner of Japan

In My Theatre (2019), a century-old movie house springs to life with the unmistakable sound of film flickering through a projector. Although the Motomiya Movie Theater in Japan has been mostly defunct since 1964, its owner Shuji Tamura still keeps it operational, preserving the experience of seeing a film on film, before the age of multiplexes and digitisation. The Japanese director Kazuya Ashizawa’s charming observational portrait captures Tamura as he screens old movies for an audience of students and cinephiles, and gives behind-the-scenes tours of the cinema. Combining captured sounds and a poignant accordion score, Ashizawa seems to find a sweet nostalgia in both the historic space and the man who tends to it. This short documentary was made before the theatre was threatened by – and saved from – flooding caused by a typhoon in October 2019.