PRPG:

The Cinema at the End of the World

April 8, 2014

The sands of Egypt contain many lost treasures and secrets.

Cinema of Sinai EgyptBack in the early 2000s, a French man named Dynn Eadel toured parts of Egypt’s immense Sinai Peninsula. He fell in love with the desert’s rugged beauty but felt it was missing something: an outdoor movie theater. Eadel returned to Paris and found a group of investors willing to provide him with enough cash to follow through with his outlandish plans. He picked out a gorgeous spot at the southern tip of the desert about 12 miles from Sharm el-Sheikh, the nearest town, and got to work. Eadel had a special movie screen built and tracked down 150 wooden seats, some other furnishings, and a projector from an old theater in Cairo.

The Frenchmen planned a huge party for opening night but he overlooked one thing: whether or not the locals actually wanted him to put a cinema in their desert. According to one report, Eadel’s big night was a big disaster. With the regional governor and other dignitaries in attendance, everything went wrong. Someone sabotaged the projector’s electric generator, which meant the cinema’s first screening had to be cancelled.

Further clashes with the locals led to Eadel abandoning the project, but the cinema is still out there. But it’s in bad shape, and the screen has collapsed. Although not very old, the theater was completely forgotten until Estonian photographer Kaupo Kikkas came across it during a recent tour of the area. He photographed the cinema and later posted the eerie images on his website, which have since been republished by news agencies all around

the world. Nowadays, the place, which the Daily Mail called “The Movie Theater at the End of the World,” looks like a combination of The Grand Budapest Hotel and Mad Max’s Thunderdome.

If you’re curious, you can also track down the cinema on Google Maps. Meanwhile, Eadel’s current whereabouts are unknown. If anybody out there knows what happened to him, please drop us a line. We’d love to find out.