Located on Lalehzar Street, one of Tehran’s oldest cultural arteries, Cinema Palace was built in 1930 by Morteza Qoli Khan Bakhtiari at considerable expense. Lalehzar was long the city’s entertainment hub, home to the capital’s earliest theaters, cafés, and cinemas, and served as the terminus of the historic horse-drawn tramway.
Before its permanent establishment, Cinema Palace operated from May 28, 1919, to January 1921 in the Hall of the Grand Hotel, managed by Y. Tambour and L. Shah-Nazarian. The hall—part of the Grand Hotel complex—was designed to host theater, operetta, and film screenings and was rented to performance troupes and cinema operators.
An early promotional notice from the period highlights the cinema’s ambition, advertising a lavish production of Salammbô—based on Gustave Flaubert’s novel—boasting massive battle scenes and an unprecedented budget.
The preserved artifact at the Cinema Museum consists of a three-seat row of foldable wooden chairs, reflecting the design of early cinema seating. Cinema Palace gained prominence for showcasing foreign sound films, but its popularity later declined due to distribution challenges, including the lack of dubbing for imported titles. The building was eventually demolished, and the site is now occupied by the Kuwaiti Bazaar near Istanbul Square.