The Cine Buñuel opened with «Un chien andalou» and has not changed its mind in forty-two years

On 16 January 1984, inside El Almacén in Arrecife, a projector was switched on for the first time. On the programme: L'âge d'or and Un chien andalou. You could not be more explicit: the room was called the Cine Buñuel, and Luis Buñuel had died only months earlier, in 1983. The name was a tribute and, at the same time, a statement of what the place intended to do.

Forty-two years on, it is still doing it.

What it actually is

It is the only place on the island showing auteur and independent cinema in the original language. Not what the multiplexes carry, but what would otherwise never reach Lanzarote at all: films with minimal or no presence on commercial circuits, retrospectives, documentaries, the things that surface at festivals and then vanish.

Put another way: if you live here and you care about film, the difference between seeing four titles a year and seeing forty runs through that door.

Why Buñuel

Choosing Buñuel in 1984 was not a neutral decision. He is the Aragonese who spent his life making films no circuit wanted — expelled, censored, shooting in France and Mexico because in Spain he could not. Putting his name on a public cinema meant saying: here we screen what is not screened elsewhere.

That is a promise few cultural spaces keep for four decades. This one has.

Going

The cinema is inside El Almacén, in central Arrecife, which is also an exhibition space, a bookshop and a bar. The programme changes constantly and is listed at culturalanzarote.com.

One practical note: many screenings are free or nearly free, and nobody sells out. It is one of the few good things on this island that require neither a booking nor a wallet.