Today, we have a story about a place that became something of an institution in Dubai.

The Plaza Cinema

If you were brought up in Dubai, you may have heard of it, remember driving past it, heard about it from your parents or their friends.

The Plaza Cinema opened in 1972 and was demolished in 2015.

It's a business basically as old as the United Arab Emirates itself,

and we wanted to find out what kind of a story we could tell by just focusing on this one slice of history.

Because when the cinema shut down, it affected a lot of people.

As soon as word got out that the plaza cinema was shutting down, it became kind of this

personal project to go and see it and to really understand its details and so on.

This is Boutena Katham. She owns the independent cinema in Dubai, cinema Aqueer. I went in and at different stages of its demolition. And at the beginning it was just kind of the seats that were taken out. But a lot of things were in place. Even the projectors, like the 35 millimeter projectors were still there. Whenever I go there, I felt every time I felt that there is something that need to be saved.

And this is Amirati photographer and archivist Ammar Al-Attar.

Like either pictures or either like posters.

Most of the things that were there, I think it was going to the trash.

I didn't see anybody who was interested to come and save anything.

At that point, you know, there's probably like asbestos in there and, you know,

and like rodents and you could hear things like moving around.

So whenever I go, I wear gloves and I wear sometimes mask.

There were like, you know, ticket stubs, there were receipts and posters and so on.

Like it looked like somebody had just left the building, you know?

So I started slowly like scavenging, collect, collecting,

whatever I could get my hands on and fit into my Volkswagen golf.

Honestly, I felt that these things will go to the rubbish or the trash if nobody will take it.

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