Project screens movies for communities that have never seen them

Mobile Movies is screening both entertaining and educational films to enrich and inform the lives of those living in remote areas.

We learn a lot from the cinema, and even fantastical summer blockbusters can reveal some truths about the way we live. However, there are some remote communities where movies just aren’t a part of residents’ lives. In order to open up the silver screen to those corners of the world, a new project called Mobile Movies is screening both entertaining and educational films to enrich and inform their lives.

Firstly, local agents are equipped with smartphones and visit the locations where a Mobile Movies event may take place, using the devices to collect data about the issues that affect each particular area. Using this information, the scheme — which is run by openDOOR, an arm of Singapore-based sustainable business group Newton Circus — curates a night of movie screenings designed to uplift, engage and educate. Viewers are attracted through feature-length commercial movies and children’s films, which are interspersed with documentaries and instructional shorts that teach them how to use devices that can improve their health and lives, such as water filters, solar lanterns, and fuel-efficient cooking stoves. The agents that run each event are selected from the local population, giving members of those communities sustainable employment as gatherers of useful data about typically closed-off, rural villages. The video below shows one of the Mobile Movies events:

The project offers entertainment to those in areas with little electricity and poor living standards, in return for crucial data to help those rural communities improve. Are there other ways to bring new technologies into remote parts of the world?

Spotted by Satya K, written by Springwise