Cinema’s mobility—the medium’s capacity to move beyond the confines of theatrical exhibition spaces—has long been exploited on the African continent, and to a diversity of ends. Even south of the Sahara, commercial theatrical exhibition—whether in roofed establishments or open-air venues—has coexisted with noncommercial, nontheatrical iterations of cinema since at least the 1930s. Colonial rule facilitated the rise of mobile cinema units consisting of vans, 16mm projectors, reels of 16mm film, collapsible screens, and—perhaps most significantly for the spread of market ideology—interpreters or comperes whose task was to “explain” the meanings (including the capitalist encodings) of imported films.

In the aftermath of independence, colonial cinema vans were repurposed for neocolonial enterprise—heartily adopted by multinational giants, including pharmaceutical companies, for the exhibition of industrial films and the associated selling of drugs and other products. “Mobile vans reach Africans,” announced the American trade paper Business Screen in 1961. “The showing of sponsored advertising films and public-interest short subjects is a familiar practice throughout these lands.” Indeed, during and after colonial rule, mobile cinema units were exploited by numerous commercial organizations, including Unilever and Procter & Gamble, in order to move various products. By the 1960s, numerous pharmaceutical companies had co-opted these immensely popular cinema vans in order to advertise and sell their products, employing hawkers to describe these goods in detail (and, of course, to identify their prices for cinema audiences).

Introduced by colonial governments committed to cultivating respect for free-market enterprise (however politically and racially constrained), mobile cinema units were later employed to help expand practices of consumption across the continent, thus confirming and extending their original function as instruments of the capitalist world-system. Brought to village squares and athletic fields, cinema vans, with their prototypical combination of screen entertainment (such as gangster films and romantic melodramas) and multiple modes of advertising (short industrial and promotional films accompanying the feature-length attractions, marketing slogans discernable on signage, and “interpreters” trumpeting the benefits of particular consumer items), anticipated a central aspect of today’s multiplexes, where African audiences are assailed by commercials for Coca-Cola as they wait for the latest superhero film to start.

Mobile cinema units—prized pedagogic mechanisms of colonial governments, later embraced by indigenous elites and multinational corporations—required little more than automobiles, projectors, and folding screens. They routinely attracted large and enthusiastic audiences, even when exhibiting dry “developmentalist” documentaries. The immense popularity of these “traveling vans” is captured in a 1940 article in Documentary News Letter: “When a van arrives at a village the show is announced through the loudspeaker, and (in Nigeria at least) an audience of anything from 2,000 to 15,000 can be rapidly collected. Before the film is shown, its story is first explained in simple terms through the microphone. After it is over, a short talk follows, punching home the main message of the film.”

It is against this backdrop that Sunshine Cinema, a solar-powered mobile-cinema network, has emerged. Since 2013, it has screened to over 8,000 audience members across southern Africa, offering film showings and workshops devoted to community building and the pursuit of social justice. Sunshine Cinema’s reliance on solar power and its emphasis on environmental challenges should be of particular interest to anyone examining questions of power generation on the African continent in an age of accelerated climate change. Indeed, a commitment to solar power—what Sunshine Cinema both promotes and embodies—is increasing throughout the continent. Nigeria, for example, invested $20 billion in solar projects in 2017 and is currently building a $5.8 billion hydropower plant to bring electricity to a rapidly growing population (which current estimates put at 198 million people, and which is expected to more than double by 2050). For some national economies, shifting to renewables is a means of getting more media to more people—a goal that resonates with some of the objectives of Sunshine Cinema.

In the following interview, Sydelle Willow Smith, the director of Sunshine Cinema, reflects on the network’s origins, development, and possible futures.