8 Takeaways from the 15th Durban FilmMart

“Month End” (Courtesy of Durban Film Festival)

The 15th edition of the Durban FilmMart, which ran July 19 – 22 in South Africa’s sun-splashed coastal mecca, wrapped on a high note this week with an invigorating sense of possibility among the industry professionals making the trek from all corners of the continent. The future of film finance in Africa, the prospects of pan-African collaboration and the pressing need to build a sustainable industry in the face of climate change were all on the agenda.

Nearly 1,500 delegates attended this year’s DFM from 58 countries in Africa and beyond, with a lineup that included Netflix’s director of content in sub-Saharan Africa, Dorothy Ghettuba, and creative talent director, Chris Mack; Red Sea Film Fund head Emad Eskander; Frédéric Fiore, president of film and TV equity outfit Logical Pictures Group; Nicola Ofoego, head of acquisitions at Paris-based Black Mic Mac; and Katie Irwin, agent and co-head of international at WME Independent.

Joining the roster of international executives was an invigorating contingent of African filmmakers that highlighted the youth and dynamism powering the continent’s screen industries into the future. While several young South African filmmakers told Variety they’d made the journey from Johannesburg and Cape Town “for the vibes,” those traveling from Tunis and Tanzania, Lagos and Lusaka, Abidjan and Algiers with their pitch decks in tow showcased the range of storytelling on the continent. “African Visions Unleashed” was the official theme of this year’s Durban FilmMart. The energy and enthusiasm felt unbridled.

Here are Variety‘s takeaways from a busy week in Durban:

South Africa at a crossroads

It’s been a year of soul-searching in the host nation, which is celebrating 30 years of democratic rule, and many South African film professionals this week expressed both their hope and frustration about how far the industry has come — and how far it still has to go. “I think this industry has always reflected a combination of anger and courage. You see the demand. The numbers are there. You see the beautiful work. You see the potential,” said Onke Dumeko, head of operations at South Africa’s National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF). “The challenge is how to meet that demand.” The Dept. of Trade, Industry and Competition (DTIC) took heat over how it’s managed the country’s struggling rebate system, while many insist the ongoing effort to redress the inequity of the apartheid era remains a work in progress.

“The playing field is not level for a lot of Black filmmakers,” said Bianca Isaac, of the Independent Black Filmmakers Collective. Despite a range of initiatives to support young filmmakers, many still struggle to make inroads into the industry. Still, it would be impossible to overstate how far this young nation has come in the past three decades to build a film and television industry that’s more representative of the country it serves. “The narratives that have come through the passage of time have shaped who we are as a collective South Africa,” said Yashika Singh, of South African public broadcaster SABC. “It’s not been easy. But at the same time, new stories have come to the fore.”

Women make moves

When Lala Tuku first ventured into the film and television industry in the years after South Africa’s first democratic elections, “I can safely say that there were no opportunities,” Tuku, of public broadcaster SABC, said this week at the Durban FilmMart. “All the doors I knocked on, no one looked like me. No one understood what I was talking about or understood the challenges.” “Back then, I thought I was going to change the industry,” added Lindi Ndebele-Koka, of industry group SWIFT (Sisters Working in Film and Television). “I had three main disadvantages: I was too young. I was a woman. And I was Black.”

Today’s South African screen industries have made great strides in correcting the gender imbalance — Tuku, as SABC’s head of content, is among the many women in key roles in the industry — but Ndebele-Koka acknowledged: “There’s still a lot of work to be done.” A shortage of women behind the camera and below the line remains, and sexual harassment in the workplace is pervasive. “We’re still here. We’re still advocating. I think we’re strong as ever,” said veteran casting agent Carlynn de Waal-Smit. “But I think we’re becoming a little bit tired of things being the same way that they are. I don’t like the status quo. We need to leave [the industry] in a better place than where we found it.”

Fresh voices, fresh eyes on the world

The DFM’s co-production and financing forum is arguably the leading platform in sub-Saharan Africa for industry tastemakers, and this year’s selection showcased a crop of largely emerging talents bringing a range of fresh stories, perspectives and cinematic voices to the market. Supernatural crime series “Acts of Man” took home the top prize at the industry award ceremony, giving a localized spin to familiar genre forms with a show that creators Sheetal Magan and Sean Drummond have dubbed “African noir.” Other big winners included Amilcar Patel and Chris Kets’ “Africa AI,” a documentary that investigates the hidden costs of artificial intelligence for the African continent, and “The Moon Can’t Run,” Shveta Naidoo and Naishe Nyamubaya’s film about a ragtag Zambian effort to join the space race.

Across forms and genres, the selection brought an invigorating sense of what’s on tap from African creators in the coming years. Heralding this year’s DFM as a “truly African event” that welcomed a “dynamic array of filmmakers,” Durban FilmMart Institute director Magdalene Reddy praised a selection of projects that “exemplify the strength of African cinema.”

Vive la France!

It’s likely just a matter of time before Canal+’s acquisition of South African pay-TV giant MultiChoice clears the final legal and regulatory hurdles, but in the meantime, a contingent of French industry professionals was out in full force this week in Durban. That’s hardly surprising, with Céline Leclercq, head of the co-production, cooperation and world cinema department at France’s CNC, noting that her country boasts co-production treaties with 10 African nations — more than all the bilateral agreements between African countries combined. France has supported nearly 80 productions on the continent since its Aide aux cinémas du monde (ACM) scheme was introduced in 2012, and there’s more to come from the French-African alliance, with the launch in Cannes — announced first in Variety — of a major new financing tool for African projects from France’s Logical Pictures Group.

“We are trying to bring the same kind of architecture that we have developed in Europe, especially with financing and also distribution, into the African market,” Frédéric Fiore, the group’s head, said this week in Durban. Meanwhile, South Africa is set to host the ambitious family adventure series “The Emperor’s Stone: The Search of La Buse’s Treasure,” which will be produced under the Alliance, the 2018 partnership launched by France Télévisions, ZDF and RAI. Rémy Jacquelin’s Paris-based production outfit Paradoxal, which is on board the project, has already wrapped the South Africa-set series “Recipes for Love and Murder” and “The Morning After,” which recently dropped on Prime Video in Africa. “We’re looking for new stories coming from here that will relate to people in Africa and the rest of the world,” he said.

South African solidarity with Palestine

A showcase on Palestinian cinema at this year’s Durban FilmMart, which presented three works-in-progress to industry decision-makers, underscored the robust support for Palestine from many quarters in South Africa, which brought a case against Israel to the International Court of Justice earlier this year, accusing it of genocide in Gaza. Palestinian filmmaker Mohamed Jabaly, who won best directing honors at IDFA last year for the documentary “Life Is Beautiful,” insisted that festivals and industry events need to do more as the war in Gaza approaches its one-year anniversary. “We don’t ask these festivals to put Palestinian flags on their logos, but at least to do their jobs and do the program that their audience needs,” he said.

Egyptian-French documentarian Jihan El-Tahri said that there’s “a real fracture between the industry, the times and what is required from a filmmaker,” adding: “We come to the industry section and it’s business as usual. Everybody is aware and everybody is conscious that we are at a very strange turning point in all our collective realities. The world is collapsing in front of our eyes. But the film industry is continuing as if we don’t need to address this.” Miki Redelinghuys, of the Climate Story Lab SA, stressed that despite widespread silencing of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices from cultural institutions around the world, “I think the question is how can we not respond? How can we not stand up? How can we not do something? Whatever we do, it can never be enough. But there is a certain power in doing something,” she added. “We all have to find our own path to solidarity.”

African toons take off

Before Nigerian animator Hamid Ibrahim pitched the idea that would become the Disney Plus original series “Iwájú,” a sci-fi tale set in a futuristic Lagos, he recalled his frustration that “nobody cares about Africa.” “How can there be this wealth of stories — this is literally the birthplace of civilization — and you’re going to try and convince me that we cannot produce one story that the whole world will want to see?” he said. The world has been watching in the years since: “Iwájú,” which was produced by Disney alongside Ibrahim’s entertainment company Kugali, launched on the streaming service earlier this year, just months after the animated sci-fi anthology series “Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire.”

The continent’s animation scene has reached an inflection point — the visibility extends from streamers and kids’ broadcasters to animation showcases like Annecy — and “there is a continued passion for animation,” according to Paramount VP of Africa Dillon Khan. “What Africa is missing right now…is scale.” As new technologies emerge and the high barrier for entry into the industry comes down, Khan predicts a “paradigm shift” that will democratize animation for African creators. In the meantime, they’re demanding a seat at the table. “Confidence is a key thing for us to believe in our stories, believe in ourselves,” said Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt, of South African animation studio Chocolate Tribe. Ibrahim, meanwhile, underscored why his studio’s idiosyncratic vision for “Iwájú” ultimately made it to the screen: “We knew exactly what we wanted, and we were willing to die on that hill.”

New money, old problems

New funds and financing models are offering the prospect of an African screen industry that can unleash its full potential, but there’s a steep learning curve for new entrants into the market, whether its rigid financial institutions adapting to a fast-moving industry or foreign producers navigating uncharted waters. “We have to educate them [about] what is investing into content. We have to show them the opportunity and the drawback of the African market. And we have to do that at a time where the landscape is totally in turmoil in the U.S.,” said Logical Pictures Group head Frédéric Fiore.

That hasn’t diminished excitement among African producers that a long-awaited content boom is on the horizon, but the vexing old problem of helping that content find an audience remains. “The distribution pipelines here are challenging,” said Katie Irwin, an agent and co-head of international at WME Independent. “You’ve got a commissioning structure with the streamers which has really helped a lot of filmmakers and production companies and producers get things across the finish line, but that can’t be the only road.” Joel Chikapa Phiri, executive chairman of the Known Associates Group, added: “If we don’t crack the distribution problem…we’re never going to figure this model out.”

Tapping into the diaspora, rethinking the global audience

Not everyone is convinced the answer lies in the international market alone. “The industry that I’m working with — the North American industry — does not believe that there’s an audience for African films,” said Nataleah Hunter-Young, an international programmer at the Toronto Film Festival. Independent industry programmer Themba Bhebhe, who was formerly Diversity and Inclusion lead for the European Film Market, noted that there are more than 200 million people of African descent in the Americas alone, added to the continent’s population of 1.2 billion and the millions more scattered across the worldwide diaspora. Bhebhe stressed that “we have to be really critical about a status quo” that primarily centers North American and European eyeballs (and wallets), particularly for filmmakers who “want to make films which aren’t necessarily meant to resonate with this ‘global’ audience.”

“My advice would be to develop the audiences where you’re at. There’s nothing more important than that,” said Hunter-Young. “When you think about the industries around the world that have been the most successful, they rep their home first.” How to disrupt traditional distribution models in a monetizable way is, of course, a multibillion-dollar question. But as Intl. Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) programmer Sarah Dawson noted: “I think there’s opportunity and excitement and joy in thinking fresh from our perspective in Africa about how we can be the future of how films find their audiences.”