Yorck cinema group

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Yorck Kino GmbH
legal form GmbH
founding 1978
Seat Berlin
management Christian Bräuer, Georg Monastery
Website yorck.de

The Yorck Kinogruppe (actually: Yorck Kino GmbH) is a Berlin cinema company. It includes 14 cinemas in the city area and one open-air cinema . This makes it the largest independent cinema operator in Berlin in terms of the number of cinemas. In 2003, the company was named "European Cinema Operator of the Year".

profile

The Yorck cinema group opened the city's first original language houses (in contrast to the cinemas of the Allied troops, which were open to everyone). Accordingly, the original versions still shape the program of all the group's houses to this day. The cinemas regularly receive awards and prizes for their programs, such as the Federal Government's Cinema Program Prize.

The company publishes the film magazine Der Yorcker and has developed independent series and projects such as Play it again or the weekly queer film night MonGay.

Another focus of the group's work is working with school children and young people. The Cinema for Schools program was established back in the 1980s, and the company continues to offer special programs for school classes to this day.

history

Beginnings

The beginnings of the Yorck Kinogruppe go back to the late 1970s. Around the student Christian Meincke (later: Filmverleiher / MFA-Filmverleih) a team was formed at the beginning of 1978 with Manfred Salzgeber , Knut Steenwerth (cinema technology) and Georg Kloster - who worked at the Berlin cinema Bali up to that time and is now managing director of the company took care of the shabby Kreuzberg Kiezkinos Yorck . The entrepreneurs made this movie theater, which had received little attention from the distributors, economically attractive again. The number of visitors rose and film distributors had premieres shown here, a long way from the entertainment center in Charlottenburg .

In the spring of 1979, Kloster and Steenwerth consolidated their position on the Berlin cinema market with the opening of Broadway am Tauentzien and Rixi in the Neukölln district , which after extensive renovation was called Off (now: Neues Off ) has been. The opening of Broadway was a sensation for an off-cinema operator at that time, as it was located directly on Berlin’s famous cinema mile, the Kurfürstendamm , whose theaters showed entertainment films for the general public. With Broadway there was now the first art house cinema .

After reunification

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Yorck Group successfully took over the GDR premiere cinema Kino International in the early 1990s , which is still operated by the group today.

Christian Bräuer has been managing director of the company alongside founder Georg Kloster since 2004.

At the turn of the millennium there was a boom in the construction of multiplex cinemas in the city, which put the Yorck Group's film theaters, which were mainly operated as one-room cinemas, under great pressure. The 2000s were accordingly marked by severe cuts, cinemas like Manhattan and Broadway had to be given up. After a revision of the overall concept, the cinemas have been appearing externally under the common umbrella brand Yorck Kinogruppe since 2009 , but still keep their individual names.

2010s

Room 6 of the delphi LUX, which opened in 2017

In 2017 the group opened the delphi LUX cinema . The unusual architecture of the cinema, in which each hall has a different color and material concept, attracted international attention. Just two years later, the cinema received the top prize for the best annual film program at the federal government's cinema program awards.

The company's founding cinema in Yorck is threatened with closure in 2017 because an investor wants to build a residential building with underground parking, condominiums and some shops at this location. In November 2016, the building committee of the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district office rejected the preliminary building request “from a town planning perspective”. However, the investor wants to plan a cinema again in the new building. Regarding the plans, the spokeswoman for the cinema group announced: "We are holding constructive discussions with the landlord in order to maintain the cinema location in the long term."

Cinemas

(Note: bold italics: names of the cinemas currently (as of April 2020) played by the Yorck Kinogruppe, all other names in normal italics )
Kino International, 2010

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Sandra Müller: The last curtain falls on Broadway. June 23, 2011, accessed April 8, 2020 .
  2. Frame Awards - delphi LUX. Retrieved April 8, 2020 .
  3. ^ Federal Government - Germany's best art house cinemas . Retrieved April 8, 2020 .
  4. Jochen Knoblach: The final credits are imminent . In: Berliner Zeitung , 15./16. July 2017, p. 9.
  5. Yorck Kinos Berlin - “Blauer Stern” joins Yorck Kinogruppe. Retrieved June 16, 2018 .