Cera-Jane Catton

A sunshine driven media initiative addressing social and environmental challenges through short films has taken off from Cape Town. Sunshine Cinema is a mobile cinema that converts solar power to social impact. It also facilitates workshops and how-to videos through community engagement.

“Our aim is to connect change makers to wider networks, amplifying the voices of grassroots active citizens,” says Sydelle Willow Smith, researcher at Sunshine Cinema. “We celebrate local stories, educating, uplifting, inspiring and connecting people.”

Made up of a small team of storytellers, filmmakers and researchers who are passionate about creating an alternative distribution platform. “We believe in making our media screenings a soapbox for local voices to engage. We believe media can be used as a tool to activate social dialogue, which is why we also run media training workshops with active citizens at our screenings” explains Smith. In addition, they are shaking up the local media industry. “Our production company Makhulu is apprenticeship based. Our core team is comprised of passionate individuals, many who are from previously disadvantaged backgrounds that gain on the job training.” They run a scholarship partnership with SAE film school in Woodstock, Cape Town. A Sunshine Cinema full scholarship is awarded each year to an up-and-coming filmmaker. The 2016 Sunshine Cinema/SAE Scholarship recipient was Lufefe ‘Fez’ Figlan.

They run a pop-up cinema with their screen, sound and projector all using solar power and an inverter from their partners at MLT Power, a Cape Town solar manufacturer. “We screen to up to 200 people at a time. We also have a smaller cinema system that fits into a small pelican case, with micro projector, wireless speakers and a mini solar power and inverter which we use for smaller scale events for up to 50 viewers.”

During the International Aids Conference, held in Durban between 19 and 22 July 2016, Sunshine Cinema hosted a series of free film screenings in surrounding townships. Supported by the Open Society Foundations Public Health Program the films provided perspectives of youths from South Africa, Zambia and Tanzania facing the challenges of access to care and social stigmas. These events provided a platform for engagement and dialogue within communities that otherwise would not have access to the conference and challenged community members to consider how they may impact the fight against HIV and AIDS.

In 2016 Sunshine Cinema were the official satellite screening partner of The Encounters Documentary Film Festival hosting screenings in Khayelitsha and Langa.

Since 2013 they have screened to more than 6000 direct audience members in shipping containers, community halls, schools and various other pop up cinema locations. “We plan to continue building our alternative distribution platform,” says Smith.

They too are partners of the Zambia Festival of Action, the fifth annual festival took place in July in Livingstone. Run by Greenpop the festival is a learning project that teaches sustainability and active citizenship as they plant thousands of trees at schools and community farms in an area where deforestation is an issue.

Sunshine Cinema plan to partner with an international film festival focusing on African cinema to ensure more African cinema is seen on the continent.

In a country that has been dwarfed by war, where there is not a single cinema nor a film industry, the Juba Film Festival began. In the world’s youngest nation, South Sudan’s first ever festival of its kind was held in the capital city, Juba, where local filmmakers armed with cameras, mics, and umbrellas are working to create one.

“Nobody, war or evil will stop us from enjoying our stories through the power of film. South Sudan has been like a battlefield, but we gained independence and there is a great need to share our own stories,” says the festival’s founder, Simon Bingo, an orphaned refugee turned local TV personality.

The festival was a dream made possible by a grant through Internews and USAID.  The hope is that it will kick-start a film industry in South Sudan. With support from donor agencies including the local German embassy, and the guidance of professional mentors from New York’s Barefoot Workshops and guerrilla filmmakers What Took You So Long. Bingo describes the project as a pop-up film school for young South Sudanese filmmakers. “There’s no infrastructure to learn about film here,” he explains. ”The festival is more than about showing movies; the goal is to build capacity to make movies.”

Pitching sessions and workshops were conducted with four outside mentors where four scripts were chosen from South Sudanese stories that were then made and edited and screened at the film festival. The Juba Film Festival culminated with screenings of these four movies and selected submissions on 7 July 2016, two days before the fifth anniversary of South Sudan’s independence. 40 films had been submitted for the festival. 30 were selected for screening during the festival which was held from 4 to 7 July 2016. 11 films were selected to compete for prizes.

“We have a diverse country with a lot of stories, it is important to find a platform to tell them,” says Bingo. He first fell in love with movies as a teenager, watching outdoor screenings in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in northern Kenya. He picked up camera skills after a stint with the NGO FilmAid and later won a scholarship to pursue a film degree in Nairobi. When he graduated in 2009, he moved back to Juba, just as his homeland was pushing for independence from Sudan. He found a job at the South Sudan TV network as a video editor, and later developed the Bingo Show, a weekly programme airing music videos.

“The film festival was very well received,” says Bingo. He describes the 900 seat theatre, the flagship venue used for the screenings, as being full for three days. As were the other venues, namely the French Institute open space, Youth Sports Centre and Juba Tukul. “Individual awards like best director, editor, camera, actress or actor and script etc. and cash prize for the best fiction and best documentary,” explains Bingo. “We also received ten international films produced about South Sudan.” Bingo describes the first of what he plans to make an annual festival as a creative, peaceful revolt, to diversify the pervasive stereotypes about the new nation in the foreign press.

By Cera-Jane Catton

Through the sharing of native narratives, the universal medium of storytelling allows people to better understand one another and greater appreciate diversities. Ensuring that limitations and lack of equipment are not a deterrent, filmmaker Steve Clack takes workshops around the world, to show how one can use what they have to tell their story to the world.

New York based Bent Marble offered a free documentary filmmaking workshop to Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF) groups. Founder Clack says his company offers courses that foster multicultural understanding through empowering people to create their own digital stories with the resources they already possess. Bent Marble focus on locations and communities that don’t normally have access to training in filmmaking and the digital arts.

“The workshops at ZIFF were a great success,” says Clack. His workshop focuses on training in how to make a documentary, including all stages of pre-production, production, and post-production. “I was extremely impressed with the initiative participants showed, the depth and breadth of the topics they chose, and the extent to which they helped each other through this challenging process,” he adds.

Clack says a unique challenge at the ZIFF workshops was that there were many participants who did not speak English. “To date I have always taught workshops in languages in which I am fluent (English, Spanish, and Indonesian), and this marked the first time that we needed to enlist the help of a translator, who was only available for the first two days. With the translator’s assistance we got through day one, which was a big day of film idea development and production skills training. And on subsequent days, specific students who were fluent in English and Swahili helped their fellows and their instructor, by providing on-the-spot translation when needed. It was truly a beautiful thing how much we helped each other and how well it worked.”

Clack says the final films produced in the workshops were impressive, “and definitely among the best that have been produced by any workshop group I’ve facilitated to date,” and these new works were shown on the big screen at ZIFF on the final night.

Facing mostly fiscal challenges Clack funds the workshops himself and collaborates with initiatives within the country they seek to serve, namely Livity Africa in Johannesburg SA and Art for Social Change in Kampala, Uganda. “To date I have taught around 14 complete workshop series, as well as several topic specific master classes in editing, sound recording, and documentary camera work in different countries including Russia, Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, and Colombia. And I plan on taking our workshops to West Africa over the coming months,” says Clack.

Besides using the technological resources workshop participants already possess, Clack strives to take advantage of the vast experience and know-how that already exists in each workshop. “Our group at ZIFF had folks who were highly skilled in areas such as sound recording and design, and video editing. And these participants were extremely generous in sharing what they knew to help their fellow filmmakers in the workshops,” says Clack.

Hollywood based veteran cinematographer Barry Braverman led a camera and visual storytelling workshop at ZIFF. “The hunger for knowledge in this part of the world never ceases to amaze me as my students demonstrate an eagerness to learn and practise the fundamental lessons of good visual storytelling and effective camera operation,” he says. Besides offering cinematography courses at ZIFF for four years, he has done them in 29 countries around the world.

“You can’t just bring your skills in and apply them, because they don’t have resources and so you have to adjust your methods to accommodate the conditions,” Braverman explains. “The thing about Zanzibar is that there is a lot of light out there but little indoors, and so one of the things is to use very simple solutions to complex problems.” The use of mirrors and passive lighting was his solution. “When you go on the streets its very bright and it’s also very dark in the same scene and they are using SLR cameras to do video, which are not video cameras and they do not have the ability to capture a lot of detail both in the highlights and in the shadows at the same time, so that’s why I taught them to shoot late in the day when the sun is off the buildings and out of the alleys, then it looks great,” he says. Without a sophisticated camera Braverman says it is best to adjust and shoot early morning or late in the day. “The biggest problem is not technical. As you saw from the festival, audiences will accept all kinds of problems technically if they are engaged in the story. So story always takes priority. That’s why even in the camera class, it is all about story,” confirms Braverman.

Clack hopes to return and turn his former students into workshop facilitators themselves. He also hopes to improve fundraising so he can continue offering free workshops around the world, “as well as eventually have not one, but preferably three or four workshop facilitators travelling the globe, helping people make and share their stories in the modern form of the ancient art of storytelling that is filmmaking,” says Clack.