Challenges and opportunities for distributors from the African continent were under the spotlight at the European Work in Progress (EWIP) platform and International Film Distribution Summit (IFDS) held in Cologne last week.
Speaking at a discussion about how to boost distribution of European and African works in both continents, Mike Strano, co-founder and COO of Kenyan online distributor YAKWETU, described the situation in Kenya where there are about 800,000-900,000 cinema visits a year with the average cinema-goer going four times a year.
“That means, you’re looking at an audience of 200,000 out of a total population of 56m,” he observed. “Cinemas are unlikely to take up local content because they have such a large slate of Hollywood films to show as well as Bollywood films because there’s a large Indian community living in Kenya.
Strano pointed out the level of penetration of SVOD in Africa is less than 1%, “ You have to ask yourself the question ‘Who has the other 99%?’ and it’s not the cinemas or the producers, it’s piracy.”
“We estimate that, in Kenya alone, the country is losing $2.2m a day to piracy, that’s $803m a year across all sectors including music, cinema, TV, book publishing and gaming,” Strano said. “We have around 54,000 ‘movie shops’ in Kenya where you can walk in with a drive and download content and then plug the drive into your TV at home.”
When it comes to handling African or distributing European films in African countries, sales agent Julien Razafindranaly of Berlin-based Films Boutique underlined the benefits of structuring aa film as a European co-production.
“For us and our partners, the theatrical distributors, it makes a difference if your film is considered to be European or not,” he said, in reference to the funding support a European work or distributor can receive.
Morocco-set The Blue Caftan, a co-production between France, Belgium, Denmark and Morocco, that premiered in Un Certain Regard in 2022, was the most recent African film the company had handled.
“We then got support from Creative Europe which was something north of € 600,000 of subsidies to help our distributors in Europe to release the film,” Razafindranaly recalled
Selling European films to Africa is not straightforward, said Razafindranaly. He spoke of working with distributors based in Lebanon or the Emirates who buy for certain windows in African territories and noted that if one is selling a film to France, for example, the distributors would then also take on the rights for French-speaking territories in Africa.
But he note the theatrical market in Africa is “very limited” even though there were some new developments in Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt.
Distribtion academy
EWIP and IFDS were the second industry events to be visited by the eight participants of the African-European Distribution Academy (AEDA) as part of their five week residency in Germany. They had previously spent five days at Filmfest Hamburg at the end of September and are attending DOK Leipzig next week.
One of the participants, Ethiopian creative entrepreneur Aaron Kassaye, said the four days in Cologne had shown there are substantial differences between how film distribution operates in Europe and Africa.
“The marketing budgets in Africa are very limited, so with those constraints, we have to try to reach the maximum audience and be creative and target the right people. It’s more about the right allocation of resources,” he suggested.
“Seeing the different strategies adopted by distributors from countries like Japan and Spain of ways to reach their audiences was a great learning experience because it allows us to pick and choose what might work for our part of the world,” agreed Ceke Mathenge, co-founder and artistic director of Rwandan production and distribution company Kaze Productions.
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