Magazin Filmkunsttheater

The Magazin Filmkunsttheater sits in Hamburg-Winterhude, inside a heritage-protected residential complex designed by Fritz Schumacher as housing for workers and retirees. It ranks among Hamburg's oldest traditional cinemas still running, second only to the Passage Kino. Its elliptical auditorium began life in the courtyard of those very blocks.

Inside, 370 guests face a Cinemascope screen measuring 4.9 by 10.5 metres. The story has a gap: the hall went dark during the period remembered as the cinema death. Gerd Fölster later led the renovation, removing about a third of the old seating and refreshing the decor to contemporary taste. A new screen arrived only when regular screenings resumed at the end of January 1974. In 2013 the analogue thirty-five-millimetre projector gave way to digital Kinoton technology, and the sound and house systems received an update too.

The programme keeps changing, and Sunday matinees and other live events appear regularly. A non-profit support association founded in summer 2007, Magazin Filmkunst und Kultur in Winterhude e.V., campaigns for the cinema's long-term preservation. Take a seat around row four or five and you hit the hall's acoustic focal point, where the sound concentrates.