Victoria West - Travel & Tourism Guide Victoria West - Afrique Du Sud

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The local chronicle reports that the local farmers, enriched by the wool trade, were shown animated pictures as early as 1902. But it was a Greek immigrant who was to revolutionize everything. In the 1920s, the enterprising Andrew Aristides Bassil came to Victoria West to run the Good Hope Café. He then decided to open a real cinema, the Apollo Talkies Theatre. In 1930, the first talking pictures were shown. The adventure ended in 1981. Thanks to private and public funds, the cinema was reborn in 1999. Today it is the only active and intact Art Deco cinema in South Africa, the only purely associative cinema in the country.