11. Revue Cinema - 400 Roncesvalles Avenue

Roncesvalles is known today as the centre of Toronto’s Polish-Canadian community, but its European presence includes a local German population that grew on the west side in the latter half of the Twentieth Century. The Revue Cinema is one of the few remaining independent movie houses in the city and continues to show a wide variety of old and new movies, as well as art house films.

In 1911 there was a theatre-building boom in Toronto and that year the Suburban Amusement Company was granted a permit to build a theatre here. The name of the developer gives a sense of how “out there” this part of Toronto was at the time, with farmland not so far away as the city grew into the countryside. By the 1960s, it was a hotspot for that growing German community as German-language films were shown throughout the decade. Despite the precarious nature of independent cinema in Toronto, the Revue continues to operate, today as a nonprofit cultural community organization. Not far from here German born artist Gustav Hahn, brother of sculptor Emmanuel Hahn, painted a well-known graphic record of the 1913 "Great Meteor Procession".