The Oscar-nominated Ugandan political documentary, Bobi Wine: The People’s President

Poetically, the end of Showmax coincided with the start of Africa Month. I’d worked with the streamer since its first Original, Tali’s Wedding Diary in 2017, so CANAL+ shutting it down left a hole in both my wallet and my watchlist.

With time on my hands for the first time in a decade, I challenged myself to take a break from South African content and explore my continent, a film a day in May, for Africa Month.

I kept up, although some days I watched a music video or a short film, because life. I watched 31 films in 31 days, and 30 of them were on YouTube.

I watched four Oscar nominees, a double Emmy nominee, winners from Berlin, Cannes, IDFA, Sundance, and Toronto, multiple Vimeo Staff Picks and Short of the Week selects. These represented 20 African countries and more than 190 million YouTube views.

It was really fun: not much of a challenge at all because these aren’t good African films; they are good films. Period.

African content is better than ever. Funding isn’t.

African content is better than it’s ever been right now. Rwanda’s Ben’Imana, directed by Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo, just won both the FIPRESCI Award and Caméra d’Or at Cannes Film Festival, awarded to the best first feature. Meanwhile Bradley Fiomona Dembeasset won the Best Actor award in the Un Certain Regard section for Congo-Central African Republic feature Congo Boy, directed by Rafiki Fariala.

In 2025, South Africa had a record five International Emmy nominations, ranking third globally ahead of France, while Kenya received its second nomination ever in the awards’ history.

Ironically though, there are currently fewer buyers, not more. Amazon Prime Video and Paramount have publicly retreated from local content in Africa. Disney+ has gone quiet. Netflix is following the money to South Africa and, to a lesser degree, Nigeria, and increasingly towards melodrama, reality TV and true crime.

We’re still waiting to see what CANAL+ has planned now that they own MultiChoice and all its properties, beyond Cynthia Erivo playing Miriam Makeba in The Road Home for STUDIOCANAL.

And fair play: as the closure of Showmax has shown, distribution is a business and needs to balance the books. The venture capital streaming era is over.

YouTube – or nothing?

All this means YouTube is slowly becoming home to everything else.

Many of the holdouts aren’t available to stream anywhere in Africa at all for now, even the big, Oscar nominees like District 9, Io Capitano, Timbuktu and Hotel Rwanda.

Take On Becoming A Guinea Fowl, written and directed by a Zambian, starring a Zambian, and made in Zambia. It was Rotten Tomatoes’ best-reviewed film of 2025, with a 100% critics rating. It won major awards at Cannes, London and the Black Reel Awards. It signed to A24, the international distributor every filmmaker wants right now, other than Neon.

It did everything any African filmmaker can ever dream of. Is it available to stream in Africa? Of course not.

What happens when all our stories come from elsewhere?

Growing up in the Southern Suburbs of Cape Town didn’t really equip me for life in the other parts of Africa at all; like many South Africans, for much of my life, I knew more about London and New York than Lagos or Nairobi. I probably still do.

In South Africa, I often hear that there’s no market for English-speaking local content, because we can supposedly identify completely with international films and series, so we don’t need to see ourselves in local shows, the way Afrikaans or Zulu audiences do.

But when my daughter was very little, I remember she cried at Christmas, because it didn’t snow in Cape Town like it did on Peppa Pig. It was a gorgeous, hot summer day here, but she couldn’t enjoy it – because it didn’t match the only story she’d been told about what Christmas should be.

So even us umlungus need to see stories that reflect our actual lives, which, if we’re honest, have very little in common with understated English period dramas or small town life in middle America.

It’s not good for us when everything exciting we see on screen happens somewhere else. It’s not good when we normalise American operatives invading sovereign countries as the good guys. It’s not good when the stories shaping our lives are never about us. It’s not good when the gaze we look at our continent through is from colonial countries.

Beyond the algorithm

I’ve been working in the film industry for over two decades. Some of my highlights include serving as an African correspondent for Variety; a publicist for Al Jazeera English, Showmax and Triggerfish; and part of the development team on the Emmy-winning animated anthology Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire for Disney+.

When you spend as much time watching films and TV as I do, you start to see the formula, to predict what’s coming. I find this particularly when watching Hollywood content these days.

That wasn’t a problem during Africa Month. None of these films were written by an algorithm or for an algorithm. They capture life in Africa, where the stakes are high, the plot is messy, and the twists are constant.

Africa is not a country, or a genre, but these are stories I relate to deeply, even as they expand my world. Watching these films brings both the shock of the new and the warmth of recognition.

Algorithms reward consistency over once-offs, and familiarity over exploration. They steer you towards what you already know and like, narrowing your world rather than expanding it. They lead to echo chambers, not surprise.

YouTube has the audience. Just not the curation.

YouTube already reaches more people than Netflix and Spotify combined. Increasingly on TVs as well as phones. In the US, more people now watch YouTube on their TVs than Netflix. So the content and audience is there.

The curation isn’t. The best African films are still scattered across multiple channels and easy to miss.

Most of the films I watched in Africa Month have views in the millions. But Youth, a Vimeo Staff Pick short film from Egypt, still has under 3 000. Liyana, one of the most awarded African documentaries ever, has under 2 000.

Gorgeous African films are still flying under the radar, as they always have.

To counter this, I’ve started adding what I find to a YouTube channel, bringing them all together in one curated place for easy access. I’ve also started this Substack newsletter, contextualising what I watch.

#AfricaDayFilmChallenge
The reality is that a pan-African film audience doesn’t exist yet.

The only title I worked on at Showmax that topped the charts across all the key territories was The Real Housewives of Lagos. It’s hard to convince Nigerians to watch Kenyan films, or Kenyans to watch South African films, and vice versa. But being divided and conquered is another thing we all have in common.

So, even after Africa Day, I’m encouraging everyone I know to stop doomscrolling and rather explore one of your neighbouring countries you’ve never been to. From the comfort of your couch, for free on YouTube, and from a shortlist curated by a human.

First published on SinemaFocus.

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