Sun Picture Gardens, Open-air cinema in Broome, Australia
Sun Picture Gardens is an open-air cinema in Broome, a coastal town in the far north of Western Australia, where films are screened on a large outdoor screen in front of rows of deck chairs. The site is registered as a State heritage place and continues to operate as a working movie theater year-round.
The cinema opened in 1916 and showed silent films to the local community in the early years of its operation. In 1933, the first sound film was screened there, marking a shift that brought the venue in line with how movies were being presented around the world at the time.
The name Sun Picture Gardens comes from the idea of watching pictures, meaning films, outdoors under the sun, which was simply how people in Broome went to the cinema for generations. Today, visitors still sit in rows of deck chairs under the open sky, giving the evening a relaxed, communal feel that sets it apart from any indoor theater.
Getting there early is a good idea to choose a good seat, since seating is general admission and the deck chairs fill up on busier nights. Because screenings take place outside, it is worth bringing a light jacket or a blanket for the later part of the evening when the air cools down.
Sun Picture Gardens holds a Guinness World Record as the oldest continuously operating outdoor cinema in the world, without any interruption to its screenings since 1916. That means visitors today are sitting in a venue that has been showing films non-stop for over a century.
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