New Funds and Finance Models Shake Up Africa’s Screen Industries

The landscape for film finance in Africa might be rapidly evolving, but for the producers, financiers and assorted industry professionals on hand at the Durban FilmMart this week, a host of lingering questions remain about how to unlock the largely untapped potential of the continent’s screen industries.
From providing equitable access to the growing number of funding mechanisms set up to support African content production to ensuring those schemes are able to adapt to the challenges of the local market, many producers expressed both their hope and frustration with a global finance model that doesn’t always seem well-suited to the practical realities of filmmaking on the continent. Regional and global streaming platforms have fueled a surge in production, but as was made clear by Amazon Prime Video’s abrupt pullout from the African market earlier this year, that model has left local producers at the mercy of decision-makers in far-off office suites.
Still, optimism was not in short supply in Durban, with industry reps from the region and across the globe buzzing with a sense of possibility. “The world is coming here,” said veteran U.S. talent agent Dana Sims. “By the year 2030, 60% of the population on the continent will be 25 and under. By the year 2040, Africa will have the largest GDP on the planet…. This needs to happen here.”
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The Cairo-based African Export-Import Bank, or Afreximbank, which last year announced a $1 billion African film fund as part of wider efforts to boost the continent’s creative industries, sent a team to Durban to host a “deal room” where African filmmakers could pitch their projects to investors and financiers. The eye-popping size of the Afreximbank fund could certainly be a game-changer for the continent. Privately, however, several producers grumbled that the financial institution is too cumbersome, the barrier to entry too high for most African filmmakers to access.
Many nevertheless credit the overall vision of the fund and insist it’s moving in the right direction, and other financial institutions are following suit. “The responsibility that I think most of us in the financial industries bear is to create an ecosystem that allows the incubation of ideas and bring them as close to the conventional financial model as possible, so that it’s easier for the creative to access the finance,” said Kagisho Bapela (pictured), a senior deal maker at South Africa’s Industrial Development Corporation (IDC).
Distribution of African content, however, remains the hardest nut to crack, both for established African filmmakers as well as new entrants into the market. “One of my frustrations in trying to figure out how we, as a company, are going to engage in the region and how we can be more helpful is the distribution pipelines here are challenging,” said Katie Irwin, an agent and co-head of international at WME Independent. “The monetization of the distribution pipeline is really what is supposed to feed the money toward your project. And those are a bit atrophied [in Africa]. 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.”
“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,” said Frédéric Fiore, head of the Logical Pictures Group, which launched a new Africa venture this year that includes a fund to invest in content, production companies, physical facilities, as well as a distribution pipeline. The company has become a leading player in film and TV equity through key investments in film banners such as Pulsar Content and the Jokers Films, and Fiore suggested that nimble approach could become a template for financing in Africa.
“We see right now a lot of funds that want to invest in the African continent, in the creative industries, but a lot of this comes from institutions that are traditionally financing gas, roads, hotels. And their diligence process is very much similar to financing [large infrastructure projects],” he said.
“That’s where we want to insert ourselves as intermediaries between the large funding bodies, that have hundreds of millions to allot, and the projects which are [operating with smaller budgets]. It’s not the same scale. That’s what I see as a challenge and as an opportunity.”
For many investors — whether it’s large-scale institutional funds or individual producers — the biggest hurdle is making sense of a dizzyingly large and fractured market of 1.2 billion riven by linguistic, cultural and economic divides and governments with their own competing agendas. “How do we get investors that are interested but might have certain reservations, might not know where to go, might not know how to do due diligence for investments on the African continent — how do we get them in the market?” said Iman Kennerly, senior advisor and lead for business development at the U.S. government agency Prosper Africa.
“In a lot of cases, these are investors that might be comfortable making investments in the entertainment space in the U.S., but when it comes to going outside of the U.S. borders, they don’t know where to start.”
The talent agent Sims, who with producer Erica Grayson is launching a new venture focused on making commercially driven movies “with Africans for a global audience,” stressed that “there are so many producers in America who want to be here, who want to create here, and are tired of the old ways in the States.” Said Grayson: “I think that we’re at a time where there’s a huge appetite for it, it’s just the mechanics of how to make that happen.”
“It’s important to let creatives take their lead and for us to support that, and to enable them to tell those stories, and financially get creative so that they could be viable globally,” said Kathleen Burke, a New York-based producer and filmmaker who’s partnering with South African film and TV veteran Beverley Mitchell to launch Rare Bird Studios, a multi-national global production studio with a focus on pan-African, diasporic and international content. The duo is also working closely with Paris-based Betty Sulty-Johnson’s Habebo Studios, which specializes in the production and distribution of African, Afro-Caribbean and diasporic content.
“The only way for that to happen is for motivated producers, motivated institutions, to come and give fair deals and to do so in such a way that if it bisects the appropriate status quo of profiting to certain individuals, they’ll come and take what they can get,” said Burke. “I think you have to have a leverage shift to accomplish that, and that leverage shift comes from successful filmmaking that is marketable on the global stage, that is able to be enjoyed by all and will make a great deal of money for the people who made the film here.”