A Vibrant Documentary Film Presence and Call for Authentic African Content at Africa’s Premier Film Market
Durban FilmMart & Durban International Film Festival 2022
For fans of documentaries by African filmmakers, this is a heady time. Over the past couple of years, documentaries by Africans about Africa and the African diaspora have consistently garnered accolades and recognition at A-list European documentary festivals, landed places in Sundance’s World Documentary Competition, and been the official Academy Award feature submissions of several countries. The field’s talent identification programs and training labs are finally integrating a critical mass of African creatives in their pipelines.
But seeing the space and attention that African documentary was accorded in its home territory at the recent Durban FilmMart was even more heartening. The Durban FilmMart (DFM), described as “the continent’s best film market” by UNESCO in last year’s authoritative report The Africa Film Industry, is a four-day finance and co-production forum. Back in person this year, DFM 2022’s theme of “Revolution/Evolution: Changing the Narrative” aptly reflected the feeling of the times — a cautious optimism about an industry revival post-COVID and a more exuberant one about the ascendant visibility of African film and creatives on the international stage.
“It is a very, very exciting time to be part of this industry,” noted Neil Brandt, a South African documentary filmmaker and producer who moderated the DFM session “Africa in Focus: Investing in the Industry.” “There is enormous interest in the African continent right now. As Africans, we know that we have an enormous wealth of stories to take to each other and to take to the world.”
Durban Takes Docs Seriously
As part of the forum’s industry program, DFM organized “Durban Does Docs,” a series of industry panel discussions devoted specifically to creative documentary film. As importantly, documentary considerations were threaded through nearly all of the other DFM sessions outside the dedicated doc stream.
Several themes that resonated across sessions will be familiar to most gatherings of the documentary film community, but they were grounded, in Durban’s case, in Africa-specific experience and reflecting the candid concerns of African and African diaspora practitioners.
First is the emphasis on authenticity and representation from the insider perspectives of African storytellers. Several filmmakers highlighted the need to push back against the tradition of extractive practices, embedded in the historical roots of ethnographic and documentary filmmaking in the Global North. Senegalese producer and cultural programmer Yanis Gaye pointed out, “This goes back to the colonial time and the fact that a black person wasn’t allowed even to hold a camera until the 1950s.” While many filmmakers are boldly reclaiming the authorial voice, there is still a struggle to access sufficient resources to do so. “It’s a moment of change,” for sure, Angolan creative Kamy Lama noted, but “all these moments are tricky.”
One example is the persistent distribution and exhibition bottlenecks that prevent African audiences from seeing African films. According to UNESCO’s The Africa Film Industry, Africa has the lowest per capita film screens in the world — only one cinema screen per more than 800,000 people (compared to one per 7,503 in the US).
Ambitious plans are afoot to redress this gap in cinematic infrastructure. But in the meantime, the disruptive influence of streamers in the African marketplace can hardly be underestimated. The session featuring Tendeka Matatu, Netflix’s Director of Local Language Films in Africa, created a near riot, and his declaration about the streaming service, “We love non-fiction!” was avidly seized on by attending documentarians.
An intriguing alternative avenue is the Cinema Spaces Network, an initiative to link up a new generation of cultural and social hubs in different African countries. Efforts range from the restoration of a projector theater first constructed in 1957 in the town of Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso to solar-powered mobile projection units touring rural South Africa. “Documentaries are our first choice,” asserted Tsopher Kabambi of the Democratic Republic of Congo, because they perfectly tee-up post-screening discussions in the more than 200 schools and communities reached by his start-up Ciné na Biso.
Financing, Financing, Financing
No gathering of documentary filmmakers would be complete without endless dissections of where to get the money to develop, produce, and share films and strategizing on how to monetize the various parts of the value chain.
In the African context, where direct funding or indirect support (such as tax rebates) are rare, co-productions with funding largely from the Global North have occupied a prominent place in the documentary financing landscape. Outside of South Africa, there are only a handful of co-production treaties enacted by other African countries. A big priority for local filmmakers is the establishment of these more formal arrangements to incentivize cross-border investment and reduce risk, with co-production treaties between African countries being a potential novel breakthrough. However, as long-time Nigerian producer and director Ike Nnaebue noted, finding “the people you can vibe with” is just as critical a part of the co-production process and fostering such networks is exactly what venues like DFM facilitate.
In that role, DFM serves as an important node on the continent for what might be termed “funding plus” initiatives, those in which potential financing is on offer as well as different packages of mentorship, professional development and learning opportunities, and community building. Hot Docs-Blue Ice Docs Fund, for instance, announced earlier this year awards of $150,000 for nine African documentary projects, several of which get access to private filmmaker labs at DFM. The Whickers had also announced the launch of a new documentary fund for early development of projects by African filmmakers to be selected from those participating at DFM 2022. The winner was Egyptian Yomna Khattab, who is developing her first feature film Khamseen Mitr (50 Meters), described as a “father/daughter journey set in a water aerobics team training pool.”
The DFM Documentary Pitch Session brought together more than a dozen documentary film projects, which reflected the richness of aesthetic approach, storylines, and point of view that we’re coming to expect from this latest wave of African documentaries. While filmmakers from Northern African countries and South Africa predictably dominated, keep your eyes out for two nascent projects from Sudan (long absent from the production ecosystem) and two from Kenya (an emerging hub of documentary filmmaking for the entire East African region).
DFM partners with Durban International Film Festival for its documentary screenings
Running alongside the DFM was the Durban International Film Festival (DIFF). The festival’s feature documentaries were a well-curated set of African-directed offerings. A partnership with Encounters South African Documentary International Film Festival, held just a few weeks earlier, enabled six African feature docs to co-premiere at the respective festivals, a strategic move perhaps more doc and non-doc festivals should explore to increase visibility and reach.
Among this slate of films were two that have been having successful international festival runs starting from premieres at Berlinale this year and were part of the “Generation Africa” cohort of films aimed at producing new narratives about migration: No Simple Way Home by first-time director Akuol De Mabior on her family’s close involvement with the political struggle for independence of South Sudan; and Nnaebue’s No U-Turn, which retraces the director’s aborted journey from more than 25 years ago to migrate from Nigeria across West Africa by bus with an eye towards landing in Europe. No U-Turn was awarded DIFF’s Artistic Bravery Award.
Two other films offered African variations on familiar documentary genres that are likely to appeal to global audiences. Shameela Shadat’s African Moot follows the well-worn narrative path of kids in competitions pioneered by Spellbound to track law students from four African countries as they prepare to compete in the All Africa Human Rights Moot Competition. Shadat adeptly weaves the stories of the participants’ highs and lows through the high-stress event with the issues of the fictional case on refugee and LGBTQ status that the students are practicing debating. On a continent that sees frequent dislocations of people and anti-gay sentiments, the film asks, whose identity merits protection, what are the state’s responsibilities, and is this new generation going to be the one to rewrite norms of social acceptance?
Music is My Life: Joseph Shabalala & Ladysmith Black Mambazo (director Mpumi “Supa” Mbele) offered a rich, at times, hagiographic-leaning portrait of the musical icon founder of the world-famous vocal group. The film found a particularly receptive audience at the DIFF screening (as it was in Shabalala’s home province), which was topped off by a live performance by the group. Given the seemingly unslakeable thirst for music documentaries and Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s enduring popularity in the US and Europe, it shouldn’t be hard for a sales agent to find distribution in the American market, especially if paired with a concert tour.
Africa Does Docs
While the continent’s doc-only film festivals are over for the year — i-Rep (Nigeria), Agadir International Documentary Film Festival (Morocco), and Encounters here — it is clear that there is a dynamic wave of documentary films and filmmakers poised to push out high-quality, locally-driven content to upcoming continental (Carthage, FESPACO) and international film festivals, on a plethora of big and small digital platforms, and in creative in-person venues across Africa.
African audiences are craving African stories and so is the rest of the world, filmmaker and former Director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival Imruh Bakari argued. Cinema by and about Africa, whether from the problematic historical archives or from the diverse and vibrant current set of African filmmakers working today, all forms an essential “reservoir of ideas about what constitutes the African” that links the past, present, and future.
