While several businesses in the regional entertainment sector continue to offer limited and intermittent services that help to keep business afloat during the rampage of the coronavirus pandemic, for the country’s cinema industry it is a question of whether it can get anywhere close to the end of the present long, dark tunnel, far less see light at the other end.
Last week in Port of Spain, an official of one of Trinidad and Tobago’s largest cinemas, Cinema One, spoke out about the pall of gloom that has descended on the industry in which investors have pumped millions in recent years.
Last week, Cinema One’s Ingrid Jahra said that there was mounting concern among the country’s approximately 1,500 employees in the sector as to whether and when they were likely to return to their jobs.
Cinema One is among four of the country’s largest cinemas – Movietown, Caribbean Cinemas, Cinema One Ltd, and Estate 101, that are reportedly growing increasingly uneasy over the future of their fifteen hundred employees, the vast majority of whom have been temporarily laid off on account of the COVID-19 related strictures that have closed the sector.
Jahra is quoted as saying in Monday’s issue of the Trinidad Guardian that setting aside the loss of jobs in the sector there had been a further impact on the country’s economy arising out of the fact that “cinemas in Trinidad and Tobago are anchor tenants in several of the country’s large commercial centres whose other tenants have been suffering from closure of movie theatres and its knock-on effects on commercial activity on the whole.”
The closure of cinemas in the region has had a lesser impact in several other parts of the Caribbean, including Guyana, where the cinema industry has been virtually wiped out over the past three decades and more on account of drastically reduced patronage linked mostly to the invasion of the industry by the DVD phenomenon. While a few local cinemas – including a Movietown franchise – remain in Guyana, cinema patronage is linked to occasional couple and family outings rather than the attendance linked to the movie addiction syndrome of the 1960’s and seventies.
Cinema owners in Trinidad and Tobago have reportedly sought to make a case for the restoration of the movie service on the grounds that international studies have shown that cinemas continue to be areas of low transmission due to the fact that “in movie theatres people tend to sit quietly, not mix and face in one direction.” That apart, cinema owners in T&T have reportedly been making the argument that none of the COVID-19 cases reported in the twin-island Republic up until now have been linked to a local cinema industry. The cinema owners reportedly contend that prior to the outbreak of the second wave of the coronavirus, cinemas put in place health and safety protocols for the protection of its staff and patrons including social distancing regulations in lobbies, concessions, and inside the movie theatres themselves, increased mandatory sanitization of facilities, mandatory use of personal protection equipment such as masks, gloves and face shields by staff and the implementation of specific scheduling arrangements for the beginning and ending of movies, though none of this appears to have persuaded the authorities to relax strictures on the operating of cinemas.
