How Amazon’s pullback from investing in African original content and M&A have affected entertainment industry players on the continent was one of the topics of a panel at the industry conference section of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) on Saturday.
The panelists of the session entitled “Pathways to Africa” were Ethiopian-Canadian filmmaker and Gobez Media founder Tamara Dawit (Grandma Knows Best, Finding Sally, Alazar, Made in Ethiopia), producer Melissa Oluwarotimi Adeyemo (Eyimofe), and Chioma Onyenwe (8 Bars & A Clef, Ime Ego), a Lagos-based producer, director, writer, and founder of Raconteur Productions, whose I Do Not Come To You By Chance, an adaptation of Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s novel, premiered at TIFF 2023. Her latest feature, The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos, is premiering at this year’s TIFF. The event was moderated by Carmen Thompson, a film programmer, curator, and cultural producer based in Scotland.
Onyenwe has felt the impact of Amazon’s refocusing in Africa. “It was difficult. The state of things have changed quite a lot with Amazon pulling out, especially because it’s also affecting the other streamers and their valuation of projects,” she said. “Personally, I had a couple of things in conversation around development, so that kind of killed my business plan for the year.”
She offered that “we need to find more sustainable ways,” adding that the involvement of streamers is one way, “but it’s not the only way.”
Onyenwe is looking for her own way. “In the past year, I’ve been trying to build more co-production strategies with Europe,” she explained, before joking: “I’m really hitting [up] white Western money.”
Dawit’s experience is different. “In East Africa, what’s happening with streamers hasn’t really affected us, because in Africa, they’ve primarily focused on countries with English content,” she explained. “So yes, maybe [we have been affected] a bit in Kenya, but a lot of the work I’ve been doing in the last five years has been Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania. Because those countries have a lot of great screen content creators but haven’t had any capacity-building support. So we never had those opportunities because we’re not producing Anglophone content.”
Her strategic focus has been on working with each other in the region. “If I can get a little bit of money in Ethiopia, and someone can get a little bit in Tanzania, and someone else in Kenya and Rwanda, then we can come together and be a little bit more powerful, have more of the basement of the house built before we go to Europe and try to work with Europeans,” she explained. “So we’re really trying to figure out how we can own more and control more of our stories as a way to protect them and work. Then with a little bit more power, we go to the table to co-produce.”
Meanwhile, Adeyemo knows about the challenges described by Onyenwe given that she deals with a lot of Anglophone African content. “In terms of the African content that I’m dealing with, it was a huge blow in that it did affect the valuations. It created less competition in terms of where we could go and therefore allowed streamers to really be able to have a little bit more comfort in terms of dictating terms, unfortunately,” she explained. “As African creators, we’re not just stuck with the options of Netflix and now MultiChoice and Canal – that used to be two providers, and now it’s just one – and whatever regional support you might have.” This was a reference to Canal+ offering to acquire African pay-TV giant MultiChoice.
Instead, Adeyemo said she is “really kind of starting to work with other African producers and creators” and look for new collaborative models.
“Independent producers are the unsung heroes of emerging film industries around the world,” the panel description had promised. “In this session, African producers bridging the continent with international markets offer their insights on best practices, considerations, opportunities, and challenges worth preparing for.”
The TIFF conversation came just days after an African industry executive was bullish about the outlook for African content. “There’s a good chance that Africa’s film industry is about to have its own global moment,” Nomsa Philiso, CEO of general entertainment at African pay-TV giant MultiChoice Group, the owner of African streamer Showmax, said in her opening speech at MIP Africa on Monday. “We’ve already seen that happen with Afrobeats, Amapiano and African music as a whole.”
