I spent most of the last week speaking with people who had just been part of something unusual. It wasn’t a typical film lab. There were no pitch sessions, no industry panels, no race to build a portfolio.
What took place instead was slower. A group of artists and thinkers gathered in southern Africa, where history isn’t something you research—it’s in the land, the monuments, the unspoken.
The people I interviewed had visited sites tied to real events—executions, erasures, resistances. Some of them filmed. Others wrote, walked, asked questions. There was no fixed outcome. The process was the point.
I was invited to write about it. Not in the usual way—no press release, no rollout. Just an email message asking if I’d be interested. I said yes.
Since then, I’ve been having conversations with the people who took part.
Participants. Organizers. Facilitators. Everyone brought something different. The voices I heard came from Namibia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia, and the work they did together sits somewhere between filmmaking, listening, and care.
I’m writing a piece on all of this. Not a summary. Not a “report.” Just an attempt to sit with what happened and offer it in a way that respects how the thing itself was held.
It’ll go out to subscribers first, in the next couple of weeks.
Here are the headings to every newsletter sent last week. To receive them, subscribe at the link (Now with a 7-Day Free Trial): https://akoroko.com/subscribe/
1 – Funding African Stories at Berlinale 2025: An Akoroko / African Screen Intelligence (ASI) Report
2 – The Big Picture: Strategic Analysis of Berlinale 2025 African Film Funding Models
3 – Six Months with Sora, Hailuo, and Gen-3: Results of My AI Video Exploration (Intro)
4 – Mapping African Cinema Infrastructure: A Historical Perspective
5 – The Global African Film Festival Landscape in 2025 (Briefly…)
6 – My Struggle to Recommend African Films on Streaming Platforms: A Personal Reflection
7 – Personalized Akoroko Premium Subscriber Sessions (Back By Popular Demand!)
8 – Headline News Summaries: Between Celebrity Visions and Institutional Shifts
Have a great week ahead!