Les Petits Déjeuners du cinéma, a growing success

Coffee, a croissant, live music and a hundred minutes of cinema, on Sunday morning. Created in 1985 at the Métropole, boulevard Adolphe Max, they spread to several cinemas in the capital, then to Liège, Namur, Ghent and Antwerp: eighteen thousand admissions in 1986, forty-five thousand in 1988. Le Soir ran “Croissants décentralisés de la Rétine” in June 1989, and “a growing success in Liège” in 1990.

The same year, in Watermael-Boitsfort at La Vénerie, Eric Vauthier created the Cinés-Apéros: the little sister of the Petits Déjeuners du cinéma Métropole. The format lasted forty years, every Wednesday, with Mirko Drag Popovitch's team. It was before the internet, before the fax.

To announce the screenings, a trailer was shot and then projected in Brussels cinemas, with Philippe Volter and Viktor Lazlo, directed by Jean-Pierre Berckmans, and more than a hundred actors and participants. Carl De Moncharline took part in it as a volunteer, alongside several well-known regulars of the Mirano. The clip has been found and will soon be digitised; it will be published here the day it exists.