On location, Zululand

Photos taken by the film crew of a silent film titled: "Siliva the Zulu." The Italian film crew went to South Africa intending to make a film about a white woman abducted by Zulus. When this was forbidden by white authorities, director Attilio Gatti decided instead to make a film about Zulu life. He designed a melodrama that had little to do with Zulu culture, but which contained the first authentic scenes of Zulu life to be recorded at that time. The crew were able to live with and work on close terms with the Zulus, and created the first full-length fiction film with an all-African cast to be made in South Africa (and possibly in all of Africa). Coming as it did at the moment of impact of talkies, the film received minimal distribution in Italy, having no more than a half-dozen screenings, after which it disappeared.