This essay examines African cinema discourse as 2026 begins, identifying five persistent “habits” that continue to shape how African film is discussed, valued, and imagined.
Continuing to move beyond the well-documented macro picture, keying in on less obvious relationships and extrapolations that describe more specific mechanics of African screen activity during the post-COVID years through the end of 2025…
Beneath the surface of discourse around familiar structural issues lie less obvious themes that shape how African cinema is discussed, valued, and imagined at home and abroad. I wouldn’t necessarily refer to them as subtle currents, but they have accumulated long enough to now influence the tone and direction of the conversation.
Based on a new review of the Akoroko archives, here are five materially supported but maybe non-obvious themes that have quietly shaped recent discourse and are worth letting go of as we enter 2026.
1. The Necropolitics of African Cinema
African cinema discourse broadly tends to concentrate its deepest reflection and synthesis at moments of death or long after the fact, rather than during periods of active authorship. This persists even as living filmmakers of the post-independence generation continue to work and release projects.
I dedicated recent reports to capturing the 2020s output of directors, including Sol de Carvalho (Mozambique), Tunde Kelani (Nigeria), Merzak Allouache (Algeria), Ridha Behi (Tunisia), Sana Na N’Hada (Guinea Bissau), Haile Gerima (Ethiopia), and other 70+ African filmmakers who completed and released new work across cinema, television, and installation contexts, with premieres at Cannes, TIFF, FESPACO, BFI London, Venice, and regional theatrical markets.
In parallel, sustained critical attention continues to arrive most forcefully at death, via obituaries, essays, retrospectives, and posthumous reassessment, as seen repeatedly in the 2020s following the passings of Safi Faye (Senegal), Souleymane Cissé (Mali), Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina (Algeria), Sarah Maldoror (Angola), Med Hondo (Mauritania; though he passed in 2019), and even author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Kenya), who co-directed an Ousmane Sembène documentary.
Yes, I realize I am making a blanket statement here, but the broader imbalance is visible across multiple generations and moments.
In my experience, this gap leads to the disconnect between filmmakers shaped by independence and post-independence struggles and many younger filmmakers working today. That link is important. It’s not a matter of blame or judgment; limited access to earlier work, uneven circulation, and the absence of sustained engagement while senior filmmakers are still present, all contribute.
What to embrace instead: sustained and serious engagement across roles and experiences with filmmakers while they are alive — with the work, in real time, placing it in relation to what came before, and keeping lines of dialogue open across generations, so that African film language, practice, and memory carry forward as a continuum rather than being reconstructed only after loss.
2. The “First” Fetish
There’s this visible rush to frame achievements as “firsts,” “breakthroughs,” “historic moments,” “unprecedented” developments. While these individual achievements matter, the relentless focus on “firsts” suggests we’re perpetually celebrating the same milestones over and over because systemic infrastructure never develops enough to make these achievements routine.
The “first” fetish creates an illusion of progress while masking stagnation. If every year brings a new “first African [X],” it means the infrastructure to make [X] normal never materialized, even when the same milestones keep being reached again and again. This way of framing compresses long and uneven histories into single headline moments, pulling attention away from the wider body of work and from what made those achievements possible in the first place.
It also creates a scarcity mindset where only one person/film/country can occupy a space at a time, rather than building ecosystems where multiple people and entities thrive simultaneously. The “first” becomes the story, overshadowing the work itself and the conditions that would allow seconds, thirds, and hundredths.
Normalize celebrating when something becomes routine rather than exceptional. Looking for progress in repetition, continuity, and volume. Supporting conditions where African films appear regularly in circulation and discussion, without needing to be framed as “firsts” or “unprecedented” to be noticed.
And, yes, the media (including yours truly) has a direct hand in this as well.
3. The Training Industrial Complex
Across the African cinema landscape, training initiatives have multiplied. It has become common for filmmakers to move from one training initiative to another over several years, collecting development credits.
Training is necessary. That is not in debate. The question is whether these initiatives, some well-backed financially, are structured to lead to tangible results. Based on Akoroko’s archives and long-term tracking, a large number of projects and participants who pass through these programs never complete films, never reach audiences, never build creative enterprises, or quietly fall out of the chain altogether.
At the same time, many of the same fundamental obstacles — financing gaps, limited distribution, weak exhibition, fragile local markets — continue to surface year after year.
Furthermore, when support is consistently framed around training, African filmmakers are positioned as permanently unfinished — always preparing, always developing, always one step away from being “ready.”
Access to production money and support is often linked to workshops and training programs instead of to actually making films. This risks unintentionally shifting attention away from structural barriers and placing responsibility squarely on individuals to keep improving themselves instead.
To be sure, none of this suggests bad intentions. However, it may be worth asking whether training initiatives need to be reconsidered at the design stage. For example, some initiatives, like the ‘Return to the Source’ lab in Namibia in September 2024, placed filmmakers in direct contact with history, community, and place, and treated the process itself as the work — spaces designed to allow filmmakers to think, reflect, and recalibrate their relationship to their work. Essential in the African context before entering the more market-driven initiatives.
4. The Francophone/Anglophone Divide
Colonial languages still shape how films move. For a long time, African films made primarily in French and films made primarily in English have circulated in largely separate paths, with different festivals, funding routes, critical conversations, and distribution habits.
Many filmmakers, distributors, and critics operate almost entirely within one language sphere, with limited exposure to work made in the other. As a result, continental cinema ecosystems remain unevenly connected, and shared reference points across remain weak. The idea of “African cinema” often exists more as a label than as a lived, connected space of exchange.
A commercially successful film in Lagos may have little visibility in Abidjan, and the reverse is often true. Language boundaries shape which films travel, which careers gain international visibility, and which stories enter global conversations. Francophone films have historically moved more easily into European festival circuits tied to France, while Anglophone films often seek validation elsewhere.
At the same time, this picture is starting to shift. In the past few years, cross-border and cross-language efforts have increased, particularly in distribution, co-production, and subtitling. More films are circulating beyond their original language zones, and more professionals are actively working across these divides. The change is uneven and incomplete, but it is real.
What to build on: sustained investment in translation and subtitling; criticism that reads films across linguistic contexts; and distribution strategies that treat the continent as interconnected, even while acknowledging linguistic difference.
5. The Announcement Economy
Per the Akoroko dataset, the post-COVID discourse was dominated by announcements: new platforms launching, new funds being established, new initiatives being unveiled, new partnerships being formed, new strategies being announced. The media dutifully covered each one, often with breathless enthusiasm. But after tracking these announcements over time, many never fully materialize, or they launch with fanfare and quietly fade, only to be replaced by new announcements.
This creates a “vaporware economy” where the announcement generates more attention than the actual work. Governments announce film commissions that never fully function. Platforms announce launches that become zombie sites. Funds announce millions in available capital that turns out to have impossible eligibility criteria, when the funds are actually there at all, etc, etc, etc.
The announcement effectively becomes the product.
Announcement culture creates an illusion of momentum and progress while actual infrastructure remains underdeveloped. It rewards the performance of commitment over sustained execution. It also creates cynicism when every other announcement is treated as a watershed moment, and most fade into irrelevance; the entire discourse loses credibility.
More subtly, announcement culture shifts focus from the hard, unglamorous work of building sustainable systems to the spectacular moment of unveiling.
What to embrace instead: to start, retrospective coverage that tracks and evaluates what actually happened after the announcement, and building a culture of accountability. Demanding evidence of impact before amplifying new initiatives. This certainly applies to the work I do here.
In the End…
These five themes might be less obvious than funding challenges or distribution gaps, but they’re arguably more pernicious because they operate at the level of discourse and framing.
They shape how African cinema is imagined, discussed, and valued. They determine which achievements get celebrated, which problems get foregrounded, and which futures seem possible. They create the conceptual infrastructure within which the more obvious structural problems persist.
Saying goodbye to these patterns requires not just different policies or funding mechanisms, but a fundamental shift in how African cinema is narrated by the professionals operating within the industry itself.
The discourse shapes the reality.
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