Digital Cinema coming to South African Villages
Starting in September, Shout Africa will roll out 20 digital cinemas around the country where facilities are most lacking, to make the movies affordable and accessible. Shout Africa chief executive Lance Samuels says that for local producers, these cinemas will provide another distribution outlet as well as the opportunity to build new audiences.
Locally produced films in indigenous languages and English will be shown alongside foreign features, with subtitles in the vernacular language of the region of the cinema.Besides the usual popcorn and soft drinks, popular traditional township foods such as maize porridge, spicy sausages, samp (hominy), mealies (corn on the cob) and fried chicken will be on sale to help make the d-cinema experience more African.
Here’s the original Shout Africa press release dated February 15, 2005 from Sithengi Film & Television Market.
This program addresses the same film entertainment niche for rural communities that we have begun exploring as part of the Kuppam i-Community program in India. The Shout Africa program sounds a bit more elaborate, since it’s apparently intended to run in fixed venues rather than as part of a mobile unit, but focuses on the same aspects - making popular entertainment content locally accessible to the rural communities at an affordable price, with food and beverages available.
It sounds as though the stability of the electric power supply isn’t much of an issue for the Shout Africa project. Running a 1 to 2 kw digital projection system for a couple of hours in a power outage requires either a small generator or a very large set of batteries, either of which is sort of manageable if the location is fixed and secured. A generator also works better for a scenario in which the viewers are indoors, away from the noise, rather than outdoors with the generator.
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