In colonial Northern Rhodesia, commercial cinemas often operated de facto racial segregation, with 35-mm.
open-air screening of films to Copperbelt mining communities led to widespread appreciation of Hollywood Westerns.
Marcus Grill, a Jewish businessman, opened Northern Rhodesia's first open-air cinema in Livingstone in 1917.
[2] In 1932 the missionary J. Merle Davis visited Northern Rhodesia to study the effects of Copperbelt mining on traditional communities.
"[3] Colonial administrators viewed this "large black mining population as a potential source of instability".
films were also made, including Kariba Game Reserve, a short feature widely circulated outside Rhodesia.
[6] Private commercial companies, and the Government-run Zambian Information Services (ZIS), put on open-air screenings in rural areas.
However, the unit did not manage this level of production, and a shortage of skilled translators meant that many of the documentaries remained in English.
[9] The Zimbabwean film director Michael Raeburn shot part of Killing Heat, his 1981 version of Doris Lessing's first novel The Grass is Singing, in Zambia.