Plaza is a single-screen cinema located in Mumbai’s Dadar neighborhood. Sakharam Govindji Keni purchased it from a Parsi owner in the 1930s and leased it to V Shantaram.
According to a 2005 report in some print media, the V. Shantaram trust sold the cinema’s operating rights to Himani & Co., and Kiran Shantaram, V. Shantaram’s son and a trustee of the V. Shantaram trust was the cinema’s general manager.
It considers cinema to be legendary. The theatre features a single screen with a seating capacity of 880 people. Kiran Shantaram is the founder of the Asian Film Foundation and a former Mumbai sheriff.
It was one of three cinema rooms that played films from the sixth Asian Film Festival. It is a significant venue for Marathi film screenings. “It is not merely theatre,” says Marathi film critic Amit Bhandari, “but the reflection of dreams of more than three generations of actors.” Character actors from Marathi theatre have appeared in both Marathi and Hindi films.
Neelu Phule, Shreeram Lagu, Bhakti Barve, Nana Patekar, Reema Lagu, Laxmikant Berde, Makarand Anaspure, and many others have all stood outside the Shivaji Mandir play theatre gates, hoping to see their faces smiling down from the hoardings.
It was one of the 13 locations in Mumbai where bombs exploded on March 12, 1993. There were ten deaths and 37 injuries. At 3:13 p.m., a bomb exploded. Tirangaa, starring Nana Patekar and Raaj Kumar, was playing at the hall. The movie began around 3:00 p.m., a few minutes after the last show had ended. There were 881 people in the audience. Shantaram later recounted that if the device had exploded during the switchover, hundreds of people would have died.
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