African Film Finance Rises as Distribution Dwindles Ahead of Durban FilmMart

The 17th Durban FilmMart runs from October 9 to 12 in Durban, South Africa, and it opens onto a paradox: African cinema has never had more money or more talent, and fewer places to sell its films.

The talent pipeline is the strongest in memory. Rwandan first-time director Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes with her post-genocide drama "Ben'Imana." Nigerian directors Arie and Chuko Esiri reached the Croisette with "Clarissa," a Lagos-set adaptation of Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" starring Sophie Okonedo, David Oyelowo and Ayo Edebiri, which Neon acquired. Venice awarded its best first feature prize to Cameroon's Auguste Bernard Kouemo Yanghu for "House of the Wind." South African directors Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar, the duo behind the Rotterdam-winning docudrama "Variations on a Theme," represent a cohort of newcomers pushing African filmmaking in new directions.

African cinema, long marginalized or pigeonholed by festival programmers, now holds an undeniable foothold in the main programming strands of A-class festivals.

More striking still is where the money comes from. African film production was long underwritten by European funding bodies and cultural institutions. That is changing. Homegrown financing tools have emerged, from institutional heavyweights like the Next Narrative Africa Fund and CANEX Creations Inc. — the IP investment arm of the African Export-Import Bank — to equity investors like MBO Capital, Volition Capital and Capital Film Productions.

"For the first time in the history of African film, there are a number of equity players who are investing in film," says Steven Markovitz, CEO of Big World Cinema. Markovitz, who alongside the African creative sector-focused HEVA Fund recently spearheaded the inaugural African Film Investor Roundtable, says he has witnessed a "critical mass of equity investors" entering the market, spending anywhere from $100,000 to $3 million per project.

"There is this moment where film is seen as a credible investment asset class," he says. "It's now up to us as producers to get ready for investors and start being able to understand the needs of equity investors in this environment."

The problem sits downstream. Successive waves of corporate consolidation and belt-tightening have seen Prime Video, Netflix and Canal+ either exit or scale back their investment in the African market. "The number of buyers has shrunk instead of expanding," says Marie Lora-Mungai, founder of advisory firm Restless Global and a leading expert on Africa's creative industries.

"There is more funding and capital than ever before," she says. "However, the reason we are not seeing more deals, despite the sudden availability of capital, is that financiers can only invest or lend if they are reasonably convinced that the film will make its money back. So capital is arriving into a market where demand contracted first, which is the opposite sequence to the one everybody planned for."

African producers and film entrepreneurs, Lora-Mungai notes, "aren't sitting idle [and] are thinking outside the box to find various ways around the issue." Local and regional streaming platforms are again looking for innovative ways to monetize demand for African content. Policymakers in a number of countries are putting the creative industries front and center.

Financiers are adjusting too. CANEX Creations Inc. and initiatives like the African Producers Accelerator — launched last year by Markovitz's Big World Cinema and the Bertha Foundation — increasingly gear their efforts toward curating market-ready commercial projects and pairing them with potential investors.

Across four days, the Durban FilmMart will serve as a rare space where representatives of the continent's scattered screen industries can gather to confront these challenges together.

"We are still so separated," says Tshepiso Chikapa Phiri, CEO of the Known Associates Group and chairperson of the Durban FilmMart Institute. "Let's start coming together and talking about what collaboration looks like — collaboration from an infrastructure point of view, collaboration from a policy point of view, collaboration from an incentives strategy point of view."

She adds: "To talk for the four days of DFM and then walk away and then meet again the following year and have the same conversations, that's self-defeating. Talk is one thing. But the action is going to be what sets us apart."