No sex, please, we’re police: raid on Romance

POLICE raided the Acropole cinema on Friday night and confiscated the controversial French film Romance which has been banned by the censorship board.

Acropole was screening the film under the umbrella of film club membership to an audience of around ten people when police officers burst into the cinema at around 9.30pm, just before the second screening.

The cinema set up a film club in June. Romance, a film which contains explicit sex scenes, was its first screening, and had been running at Acropole for the past week.

“The cinema owners initially refused to hand it over to police,” one film club member told the Sunday Mail but added that after consulting with their lawyers they relinquished the print.

The film club was due to meet yesterday afternoon to discuss the next step.

“This is not a question of a particular film club, a particular cinema or a particular individual interest,” the club member said. “We are talking here about a whole principle, about censorship and freedom of expression in Cyprus, and we will continue to campaign on this issue.”

Crime prevention squad officer Kyriacos Alexandrou said police had acted after the censorship board issued its ban.

“We checked out information that the film was being screened and so we carried out a surprise raid,” he said.

“When the law says a private screening it means a place which is completely private such as a house. But you can’t show a banned film in a licensed facility and say it’s for a specific group.”

Some confusion exists over what a film club is and who can or cannot show banned films.

In 1997, another controversial film, Crash, was banned but later shown at Cine Studio to its film club members.

But Androulla Laniti, recently appointed chairwoman of the censorship board, told the Sunday Mail yesterday it was illegal to show any banned film. “There are no club regulations. The regulations concern all films in general,” she said.

“The Acropole formed a club but this is a public showing because anyone can become a member.”

Laniti said she did not know that Crash had been shown in the past.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.