Jean-Marc Lalo, architect of the new cinemas in Africa

” I’m with Abderrahmane Sissako, he wants to re-type a cinema in Bamako, are you up for it? The French architect Jean-Marc Lalo still remembers the phone call by Claude-Eric Poiroux, founder of the network of independent theaters Europa Cinémas. It was in 2007. He had just completed in Morocco the rehabilitation of the old Rif cinema, renamed the Tangier film library. And had only one hurry, to leave.

A week later, he finds himself in the Malian capital, in the abandoned premises of the Soudan Ciné. Built in the 1960s, this room had closed fifteen years earlier, a victim of competition from television and video. Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako wanted to give it back its past luster.

The first consultations start, a subscription is launched to raise funds. The old armchairs in the great hall are on sale at 5,000 euros each. Alas, the civil war that began in 2012 plunged the country into chaos. The project falls into limbo.

This is one of the rare regrets of Jean-Marc Lalo, 58, who has to his credit the renovation or construction of four cinemas in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and an establishment, the Guimbi, in Bobo-Dioulasso. , in Burkina Faso, which is scheduled to open in October. Also under study, the creation of nine rooms in a new district of Berges du lac, in Tunis.

Relaunch the dream machine

This jovial and modest Niçois had never imagined becoming one of the architects of the new cinemas in Africa. After working in a construction company as a quantity surveyor, management controller and then works engineer, Jean-Marc Lalo resumed his studies at the age of 32 to become an architect. In 2001, he opened his own agency and created the Plateau-Frac Ile-de-France space, an art center in Paris.

The following year, he was recruited to redevelop the Ariana cinema in Kabul, just after the American intervention in Afghanistan. This field experience will be very valuable to him in Africa, where Jean-Marc Lalo tackles each project ” like a human adventure “.

On the subject, he is inexhaustible. ” In this continent, the cinema has long been in the open air, it was a party, he explains. People were talking during the movies, there were refreshments where they would go to refresh themselves during the screening. It was anything but a dark and silent room. But, little by little, the public deserted. Rents are becoming too expensive for operators. The arrival of DVDs ended to suffocate the last cinemas which were trying to survive.

There are of course idealists, who try to restart the dream machine. But their enthusiasm is often dampened by complicated financial arrangements and high borrowing rates, sometimes of the order of 17%. Correlated to the ability to raise funds, the construction time is fatally long, around ten years at a minimum.

“A big mess”

It is also difficult to find locally materials that comply with international standards, in particular fire-retardant armchairs, often imported from Europe. Once opened, attendance rates remain modest.

As for the principals, they sometimes prove to be versatile. In 2010, Jean-Marc Lalo was asked to build a cinema in a commercial space in Dakar, next to the Radisson Blu hotel built by the Teyliom group, owned by Senegalese businessman Yerim Habib Sow.

Jean-Marc Lalo is initially excited. A young entrepreneur, who surrounds himself with African talents trained in the best universities in the world, and moreover wants to create a cinema in a shopping complex, it does not run the streets. But the site suffers the moods of the promoter who arbitrates according to his priorities of the moment. Three years ago, Jean-Marc Lalo slammed the door: “A big mess. “

The experience with the Ivorian group Majestic will be much more convincing. In 2016, the architect rehabilitated a room with a rococo red molded ceiling in the Hôtel Ivoire, in Abidjan. Three other cinemas will follow in the Ivorian capital, backed by shopping centers.

“Provide a place to live”

In Burkina Faso, it is in a restaurant in Bobo-Dioulasso that Jean-Marc Lalo laid down, on a corner of a tablecloth, the design of the Sahel-inspired metal vault which now envelops the building of the Guimbi cinema. The project dates back to 2013. At the Cannes Film Festival, during a conference by Europa Cinemas, the architect met Berni Goldblat. The Swiss-Burkinabé director dreams of reviving this legendary room, inaugurated in 1957, on the eve of independence and abandoned since 2005.

Funding is a real way of the cross. We must show our white paw to the French Development Agency, worried about the economic viability and the societal relevance of the project. After two and a half years, Berni Glodblat manages to raise 600,000 euros in European public funds, to which are added some 800,000 euros of private windfall.

Jean-Marc Lalo is thinking big, despite the cautious forecasts of 250,000 spectators per year: an outdoor projection space with 250 seats, two indoor rooms, a restaurant, a cinema resource center nestled on a green roof which, once rented, will generate additional income.

The architect knows that programming, even blockbusters, is not enough to attract the local public. ” So that people agree to leave their sofas and their TV to go to the cinema, he explains, we have to offer them a place to live. “

One method: impregnation

Jean-Marc Lalo may have carved out a reputation for himself as a goldsmith in this area, he is still struggling to get rid of the impostor syndrome. His fear? That his constructions be judged above ground, illegitimate, shifted, ” French white projects “. To guard against pitfalls, it has a method: impregnation. ” The first thing i do, he explains, it is going to cafes and urban places, to smell the city, to understand how people make it their own, to feel the codes. “

Then comes the stage of maturing the first feelings of which he has learned to be wary, ” because a lot of naivety and projection are mixed with it “. Even awkwardness. On the site of the Guimbi cinema, there was thus a women’s market that had to be moved one block to start the work. The subject is delicate, even inflammable, as this small informal economy is a crucial link in the social fabric.

One day when Jean-Marc Lalo walks among the shopkeepers, a woman calls out to him. ” What are you doing here? “Immediately the architect takes out his iPad, explains the project with a lot of simulation. Around him, the circle grows, the women of the neighborhood seem conquered.

Some time later, while drilling the earth to find a source of irrigation, the workers discovered a deposit of water so important that a fountain project was studied. ” In the neighborhood, the relationship with the cinema has suddenly changed », Smiles Jean-Marc Lalo, satisfied that the Ciné Guimbi is at the same time an object of local pride and of public utility.