1946 Tacna, Peru

Enrique Armando Zapata Martineau

Born 1932

First movie memories in Tacna Peru, population 37,512

Interviewed on 1/20/18

by Sofia Gonzalez Zapata

I was approximately 10 years old when I watched a movie for the first time. My grandmother would take brother and me to the movie theatre back then. We would walk there. I remember there were two movie theatres in my city. The movie theatre we would go to was called Cine Colon. The owner was Chilean, I believe his last name was Guilling.

I grew up in Tacna, half an hour from the Chilean border. Though Tacna is not one of Peru’s largest cities, because we were so close to Chile we were more developed than most cities in Peru. We were lucky.

Back then we would watch the movies in English with subtitles in Spanish. The movies they would play were mostly American movies from the 1940s. We watched mostly Western movies back then.

The movies they played back then were all in black and white. The first movie that I remember watching was a Western called Duel in the Sun. I remember that the hero would never die and the good guys always won. I remember the movies would usually have a sheriff, and that the hero would fight against the Indians. I really liked the cowboys. I remember that many of the Westerns would star actors such as Henry Fonda or Gary Cooper.

All of the movies were foreign back then. At first they would only play American movies, but later they started playing Mexican and Argentina movies as well. There were no Peruvian movies back then.

I remember that they also used to play newsreels during the War in the movie theatres.

Ushers would take us to our seats, just like they do when you watch a play. There were orchestra seats, mezzanine seats, and box seats. There would be an intermission while they switched the film. I remember they used to sell snacks like “mani dulce” and “arocillo dulce” in large bags. They used to have four screenings: a morning showing, the matinee, vermouth, and a nighttime screening. My grandmother would take us to the matinee.