News24 | The travelling cinema: Africa’s roaming movie house for audiences in all 9 provinces

The Sunshine Cinema reaches audiences in rural and peri-urban areas in southern Africa, sparking dialogue on community issues by watching local films.

• The Sunshine Cinema and the Spark Impact Programme aim to spread African cinema to a wider audience and communities across all nine provinces.
• Over the past five years, the programme has trained many facilitators to screen local films and kickstart conversations on issues such as gender-based violence.
• Refilwe Chiloane, a Spark Impact Programme graduate, shares how the programme can be a catalyst for change by imparting skills and creating jobs.

A travelling cinema initiative has reached a huge milestone, taking its community screenings into all nine provinces and impacting facilitators and audience members alike.

The Spark Impact Programme recently celebrated the milestone of 178 community screenings across all nine provinces, reaching more than 7 300 audience members in rural and peri-urban areas.

The programme is geared towards equipping facilitators to develop an audience for African cinema by helping to get local films out into the community and aiming to reach “over 13 000 audience members annually”.

It is also solar-powered, reaching people in rural and peri-urban areas of southern Africa.

“The point of the screenings is so that you can provide a platform for individuals in your community to access films as a way to tackle issues that are happening in your community, such as gender-based violence, such as unemployment rates, such as active citizenship in terms of voting,” said Refilwe Chiloane, an alumnus of the programme.

Run by the Sunshine Cinema for the past five years, each year, 20 young South Africans are trained through a model supported by a range of government partners, banks, and corporate social investment funders to host community screenings.

And Chiloane believes she is living proof of how one’s life can be transformed one film at a time.

Through this programme, she was able to graduate and become one of the people working behind the scenes as part of the greater Sunshine Cinema team.

Develop entrepreneurial skills, hire others

Chiloane started off her film screening journey in KwaZulu-Natal in 2021, where she completed her 10 months as a facilitator following a bootcamp where they were taught to use all the equipment at their disposal.

“In that 10-month programme, you get a digital starter, which is a camera and a laptop. And then you receive your sandbox, which is what we then take into communities,” said Chiloane.

“The sandbox is the tool that we take into communities to stream the films.”

Chiloane hosted screenings from 2022 to 2024 across two provinces with a catalogue of up to 100 documentary films, to drive change in communities.

One of the other objectives of the programme is for facilitators to develop entrepreneurial skills by utilising all the resources made available to them.

Chiloane had to ensure that she could sustain herself using the digital starter kit. It was also her responsibility to create jobs in her community.

“You need to hire at least three people in your community. It’s up to you to use them on rotation or keep them as your go-to people,” she said.

By proving that she could create jobs outside the network, she then received a stipend and was empowered to continue with her work.

Broadening horizons

As a graduate of the programme, Chiloane has chosen to inspire others to want more for themselves while she continues to actively engage with the youth.

“As a person who works inside, it’s just seeing how many tools I can use to assist the next person to get their next job,” she said.

Teaching students and imparting wisdom are some of the “joy drops” Chiloane relishes.

She said she would recommend the programme because “you never know where it can lead you”.

The application for the Sunshine Cinema’s Spark Impact Programme and its next intake is from 15 January to 13 March 2026.

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