Kyoto Minami Hall (I)

During the Golden Age of Hollywood in Kyoto City, there are a grand total of 70 movie theatres across Kyoto City, with only five of those were in Minami Ward, and this is one of them. It was a single-screener in a two-story wooden building featuring an original capacity of 500 seats, opening on June 22, 1956.

In December 1963, the building was rebuilt into a three-story building made of reinforced concrete, and reopened as a Japanese film premiere theatre, but during the late-1960’s and early-1970’s, the theatre became a declining industry and began screening adult features for a time.

By 1980, the number of movie theatres in Kyoto City had decreased to 27 in total, and the Minami-kan (yes that’s its name for start) was the only one in the Minami Ward area.

Throughout much of the late-1980’s and early-1990’s had a history of changes. General films began screening back at the Minami Hall in 1988 following the Iwamoto Kinzoku Company bought the theatre and was renamed the Kyoto Minami Kaikan. Despite being a single-screener, there were times when it screened more than 300 films a year. RCS also partnered with the theatre for much of the Kyoto Minami Kaikan’s history until leaving on March 14, 2010.

On April 1, 2010, the Kyoto Minami Kaikan began running movies under its own schedule which follows the same format as the RCS era but the need to negotiate directly with distributors meant that it immediately struggled to find what films to show or not, and audience numbers dropped significantly.

However, there are some positive times as well. Right after Yurika Yoshida took over the theatre in 2013 at the young age of 24, the theatre was completely jammed as part of a special Indian film screening in 2014. It was so jammed that a line of people stretched down the stairs.

Right after the death of music legend David Bowie in January 2016, the theatre immediately acquired the screening rights to Bowie’s first starring film “The Man Who Fell to Earth” and screened it on August 13 of that same year, ahead of other theatres.

Unfortunately, despite the theatre building being completed in 1963 had deteriorated a couple years later, and the company immediately gave up on costly earthquake-proofing construction. The original location closed for the final time on March 31, 2018 while being investigated possible locations for relocation, and the original building was demolished during the final quarter of 2019.

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