The Sunshine Cinema launches with crowd-funding success in South Africa

Off to a brilliant start, the Sunshine Cinema is the product of an inspired collaboration between young social entrepreneurs that hail from trailblazing South African organizations, Greenpop, Makhulu-Moving Images and SHIFT: Inspiring Sustainable Design, to share innovations by Africans, for Africans, through the medium of a mobile, solar-powered cinema. The Sunshine Cinema can go anywhere, everywhere. It aims to fuse storytelling, as an indigenous means of knowledge transfer, and the power of contemporary media – short form documentaries and ‘DIY’ films, to transfer practical, indigenous solutions to a range of health, environmental and social issues. It promises to "share innovations that uplift, educate and inspire, powered by the African sun!"

This project will participate in the SHIFT: Sustainability Caravan, a Cape Town World Design Capital 2014 recognized project (#WDC442) that takes shape as a convoy of modified vehicles equipped to host Sunshine Cinema screenings and workshops, a series of practical skills exchanges and design collaborations, and an interactive exhibition hub to raise awareness and local responses to the Millennium Development Goals. The Caravan will travel the perimeter of South Africa - 20 000km in 100days between November 2014 and February 2015, inviting designers, innovators and global change-makers to ‘hop on and hop off’ for two weeks’ participation in the community collaborations planned for the tour. Designed to be a big, bold collaboration, the Shift: Sustainability Caravan will involve local rural and township communities, researchers and global participants in an 18month program to identify specific challenges and extraordinary opportunities for sustainable design in South Africa.

Janine Johnston, Managing Director of local coordinating NPC, Shift: Inspiring Sustainable Design and Head of Communications for the Sunshine Cinema, participated in the Word Design Capital’s pitching session last week on the 25^th of February, which coincided with the launch of a crowd-funding campaign for the Sunshine Cinema’s next pilot in the Western Cape. Making history, the Sunshine Cinema reached it’s first funding milestone on the same day, which was then match-funded by Cape Town Design NPC, putting the project in grasp of it’s second crowd-funding milestone in less than 24hours!

The Sunshine Cinema documents simple ‘engineering’ solutions, known as ‘appropriate technologies’, already in use in direct response to the environmental and social challenges faced by rural South African communities, and produces 3min DIY format clips that demonstrate the construction and application of these technologies. Screenings include relevant “edu-taining” shorts, followed by the appropriate technology clips and discussions amongst participants. These are complimented by practical skills transfer workshops that empower communities with knowledge and techniques to continue developing the solutions, becoming active and able agents of change in their own lives.

Says Johnston on behalf of the Sunshine Cinema team: “We’re thrilled that the Sunshine Cinema’s potential has been recognized at such an early stage, and we’re hoping to secure the additional start-up investment that will allow us to scale impact. Our big vision is that one day rural communities across the African continent will be hosting and facilitating their own Sunshine Cinema screenings and workshops; with open-source access to a library of globally curated appropriate technology short instruction films. We aim to develop a mobile app that will enable anyone to record low-tech innovations spotted anywhere in the world, using a smart phone, to add to the Sunshine Cinema database.”

Visit the Sunshine Cinema’s crowd-funding campaign on Thundafund and do your bit to support the project’s impact: https://www.thundafund.com/ProjectDetails.aspx?projectId=228

To find out more about the Sunshine Cinema and for press quality photographs, please contact Janine Johnston Janine@sunshinecinema.org or Project Coordinator, Stephanie Schwartner at Stephanie@sunshinecinema.org.

Join Sunshine Cinema on Facebook: www.facebook.com/sunshinecinema.org and on Instagram @SunshineCinema.