1943 Bogotá, Colombia

Victoria Owen Panero

1936

Bogotá, Colombia

Interviewed on January 30, 2023

by Alessa Kim-Panero

The first movie I’m sure I remember seeing was Gone With The Wind. It came out in 1939, I think, but I must have seen it in the theater three or four years later. It took time for movies to make it to Colombia. I thought the movie was spectacular, but I remember my younger brother—who could not have been older than five at the time—found it exceedingly boring and too long. I remember seeing Bambi around the same time too, and that my brother and I both cried so, so much. And the Wizard of Oz came to Colombia right around the same time. I’m not sure which we saw first, and how old we might have been because we went to the movies with our cousins all the time in those years.

The theater was called Cine Colombia, I think, and that theater was around for a while until the cinemas started to be replaced by larger chain theaters in shopping centers. The theaters were so grand at that time in Colombia, more like going to a real playhouse than a movie theater today. It was a fairly large cinema, maybe one hundred or two hundred people, and our nanny would drop us off in a car and my brother and I would watch the film by ourselves. Now that I think about it, she may have just been sitting in the back row keeping an eye on us. Either way, once the movie was on it felt like we were alone and we liked that freedom.

I remember the newsreel at the theater very much and while we didn’t see scenes directly from the war, they had these short clips of refugees with their bags or their families walking away from a home. No, I don’t know what they were exactly for, whether it was news or to get people to give money or what. I don’t know if they showed them in other countries, but we were so young and felt detached from it all. And I remember that after the news there was a short film which was usually a travel feature or a humor feature. The travel features were my favorite—someone showing you the French Alps, or the Panama Canal, or something. There was this one man who did these travel sections in the early forties and a different one came on at every movie.

They didn’t have popcorn at the movies. But there were street vendors outside the theater, either with a cart on wheels or with trays hanging around their necks, and you could buy something before you went inside. The best snack to get were these little mint sticks that you got in a small bunch. Or fava beans, roasted and salted. That was better than popcorn.

Teatro Colombia (above) opened in 1940 in Bogotá. It may or may not be the grand theater that my grandmother remembers.