Former theater manager Farouk Masri told journalists that his family had decided that the political situation had calmed sufficiently to make building a modern movie house profitable in a city that had lacked one for many years. "It's been missing from Nablus, the cinema houses, been missing since the first intifada, over 20 years." He said that the new cinema was, "The talk of the street, I keep hearing ... Everybody is just excited, they're very positive about it, and they're very supportive". Among the excited children in the audience were many who had never seen a movie shown in a theater, only on the small screens of televisions and video players.