So much the worse for lovers of the seventh art. In Norway, dark rooms will remain closed until 1 p.m. on Sundays, under a regulation adopted in 1735, aimed at ensuring that no activity would compete with the mass. A text that most Norwegians were unaware of until Sunday work was debated in Parliament and the newspaper Aftenposten finds traces of it.
It all started with the proposal of three deputies from the Red party (far left), at the beginning of October 2023. Faced with the inflation in the number of municipalities claiming the status of “tourist centers”, allowing them to authorize the opening of stores on On Sunday, parliamentarians call for restrictions so that the seventh day of the week remains “a different day”. Discussions then begin within the Committee on Family Affairs and Culture.
Deputies from the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party and the Progress Party (nationalist) took the opportunity to point out that the law regulating work on public holidays and Sundays is a bit outdated, since it justifies rest by necessity of “guarantee religious life and general peace”. Furthermore, while there are exceptions for different types of public, cultural or sporting spaces, cinemas are not allowed to open before 1 p.m. on Sundays, unlike museums or football stadiums.
Right-wing deputies go on a crusade
This detail is all the more surprising since almost no one in Norway seems to know where this rule comes from. Neither the cinemas, some of which regularly request exemptions from the police who grant them to them, nor the spectators, nor the deputies, untilAftenposten, therefore, reveals the origin of this regulation, “relating to the Sabbath”adopted more than a century and a half before the Lumière brothers developed their cinematography.
Here are the right-wing deputies who are going on a crusade: “Should the police really use resources to stop the Disney movie that kids are watching at the cinema at noon on Sunday? “, asks Silje Hjemdal (Progress Party). Even the head of the Norwegian church, Olav Fykse Tveit, acknowledges that the device seems “a bit special and outdated”.
But on the left, there is no question of giving in: “If we open our stores on Sunday, this will quickly have significant consequences for other categories of workers”reacts Labor MP Mona Nilsen, arguing that she has never heard of “of a cinema director thrown into a detention cell because he started a screening a little too early”. On March 5, the proposal to allow cinemas to open before 1 p.m. was rejected.