Development Distribution? EU Aid for Formal Audiovisual Distribution and the Case of Africa’s First Video-on-Demand Platform

Abstract

This article examines the European Union’s support for formal distribution initiatives abroad, focusing on ACPCultures+, an economic development program that aims to grow the audiovisual industries of developing countries through the expansion and adaptation of the logics and mechanisms of intra-European media policies. While these distribution initiatives aim to challenge Hollywood’s reach in developing countries, their activities nevertheless foster the integration of audiovisual industries in developing countries into global media industries. At the same time, the program’s pairing of formal distribution and development aid is at times at odds with audience and industry expectations. Using data from policy documents, fieldwork in Brussels, and interviews with recipients of ACPCultures+ distribution project awards—including a detailed case study of Africa’s first VOD platform—I explore how these initiatives attempt to shape formal distribution in countries on the peripheries of large audiovisual industries.

Keywords

Africa development distribution European Union globalization video on demand

Introduction

Cinema Le Normandie sits on Avenue Charles de Gaulle in N’Djamena, Chad’s capital city. The theater was built in 1949, eleven years before the country gained independence from France but was shuttered in the 1970s after the outbreak of civil war and ensuing conflict with Libya. When Chadian director Issa Serge Coelo decided to re-open the theater in 2011, it had been abandoned for decades, but $1.5 million dollars from the government helped him repair the building. Today, Le Normandie is the only operational cinema not only in Chad but also in the Central African region, showing first-run films in 3D and Dolby surround sound (Images Francophones 2014).

As a node in the networks of commerce and media that link Hollywood, Europe, and less-developed countries, Le Normandie is illustrative of how profit-oriented laissez-faire systems and government-directed dirigiste cultural policies compete and intertwine in regions that lack large domestic audiovisual industries and that are outside of, or peripheral to, what Ramon Lobato (2012) calls formal circuits of film distribution. While often conceived of in binary opposition, laissez-faire and dirigiste models “overlap” (T. Miller et al. 2005). Le Normandie screens some local productions and art house films, many of them financed through public funding from Europe and international film festivals. Yet the majority of the films screened exemplify the international production arrangements—often with European partners—that increasingly finance the expensive Hollywood films that dominate box offices in much of the world. At the time of this writing, its line-up is nearly identical to that of multiplexes in U.S. metropolitan areas: the Hollywood Tom Cruise vehicle Jack Reacher 2, the Russian and American-produced Ben Hur remake, Mel Gibson–starring French-produced Blood Father, and the French/Belgian/American Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Coelo schedules such releases to coincide with their European and North American openings—as well as screening soccer matches—to attract audiences to the theater (Images Francophones 2014).

Yet even these screenings of Hollywood productions have not made Le Normandie self-sustaining. Its continued operations depend on a similarly globalized mix of private and government subsidies: Le Normandie receives support from the Chadian telecom Tigo, Chad’s Ministry of Culture, and the European Union (EU; Images Francophones 2014). This blend of public and private external support for the theater’s continued operations speaks to the idea that formal film distribution and exhibition is worthwhile even if it is not profitable, and that it merits public funding and government intervention—a core concept of dirigisme. But it also hints at the tensions inherent in the expansion of European notions of, and policy for, an audiovisual public good beyond Europe’s cultural and regulatory edges.

This article deals with EU-funded initiatives that, like Le Normandie, attempt to bring formal audiovisual distribution to developing countries that lack it. I focus here on the distribution projects funded by an EU program called ACPCultures+, which is open to collaborative initiatives between partners in the seventy-nine countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and some Pacific Islands that make up the ACP Group of States, an organization that, since 1975, has negotiated trade and development aid with the EU. Thus, while it expands Europe’s dirigiste policies to countries on the peripheries, ACPCultures+ is also an international development program: it is financed by the EU’s Development Fund and “aims to contribute to the fight against poverty through the development and consolidation of viable and sustainable cultural industries in [African, Caribbean, and Pacific] countries” (Guidelines for Applicants 2011, 6). In practice, what such “development of sustainable cultural industries” entails is often contradictory (e.g., Isar 2017) and is here shaped by both entanglement with and opposition to Hollywood, European film industry interests, EU audiovisual policies, and the logics of international development organizations.

Part of my interest is in tracing such disjunctures—or what Anna Tsing (2005, 4–5) calls “friction”—as policies, funding, and personnel circulate from the EU’s offices in Brussels that administer ACPCultures+ and the sites in the Global South where its projects are implemented. Tsing proposes friction as a corrective to the metaphor of unimpeded global flows that has become ubiquitous in scholarship on globalization. As it deals with “interconnection across difference,” friction prioritizes dynamic instances of interaction and negotiation, and so it is useful for bringing to bear T. Miller’s (2009, 184) call for “renewed critical cultural policy studies” on initiatives like ACPCultures+ that do not operate within a unified regulatory landscape as they cross transnational boundaries defined by economic inequalities. At the same time, this research is informed by critical media industries studies’ “mid-level fieldwork in industry analyses” to account for the “complex interactions among cultural and economic forces” (Havens et al. 2009, 237). After all, as Manthia Diawara (1994, 386) proclaimed in 1994, “African cinema exists in exile,” with funding structures, circuits of distribution, and valuations for quality that are in large part located in Europe, with ambivalent outcomes for African industries. Two decades later, it remains difficult to extricate some media industries on the peripheries from the Northern blend of cultural policies and development aid that helps sustain and structure them.

Critical scholarship on the relationship between European funding structures and Southern audiovisual industries has often focused on textual outcomes: films that employ narratives and aesthetics that are readily legible to European audiences and funding sources, thereby delimiting the possibilities for Southern media even while increasing production (e.g., Falicov 2013; J. Miller 2016, 75). Similarly, I interrogate how ACPCultures+ seeks to solve the “problem” of formal audiovisual distribution by adapting distribution policies that are legible to Northern funders. I focus in detail on one illustrative case study: an ultimately unsuccessful project that attempted to create Africa’s first online, subscription-based video-on-demand (VOD) platform called AfricaFilms.TV and a complementary fleet of VOD-based mobile exhibition scooters called MobiCINE+. Like Le Normandie, these distribution projects involve collaboration and cooperation between European funding mechanisms, Southern audiovisual professionals, and private sources of funding, and they simultaneously attempt to protect Southern industries from Hollywood’s reach while integrating them into global systems of formal distribution. At the same time, I argue that ACPCultures+’s developmental aims structure such efforts in ways that raise questions about paternalism, particularly in their framing of Southern audiences.

This article is part of—and draws on research conducted for—a larger, ongoing project that considers global media and cultural policy through an examination of the relationship between the EU and audiovisual industries in the Global South. This research brings together information from ACPCultures+ policy documents, publicity materials, and trade press with interviews conducted from 2013 to 2017 with employees at the European Commission and ACP Secretariat, as well as Skype and email interviews with recipients of ACPCultures+ funding. Respondents include Denise Richert and Cesaltina Bastos (program managers for ACPCultures+ at the European Commission), Astrid Audibert (manager of ACPCultures+ in the ACP Secretariat office), Emilie Upczak of Caribbean Film Mart, Elise Mignot of the Île Courts Film Festival, and Enrico Chiesa of AfricaFilms.TV. Interviews at two other European Commission programs related to extra-EU audiovisual aid and policy provided additional background information: Chrystelle Lucas at the South Mediterranean and Middle East–focused audiovisual aid program Euromed Audiovisual, and Irina Orssich at MEDIA Mundus. Finally, this article is broadly informed by a month of fieldwork—which was conducted for other strands of this larger project—in the film and TV industry in Nairobi, Kenya, and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia during the summer of 2017, where I interviewed with distributors, VOD start-ups, and audiovisual projects that rely on aid from the EU and other Northern sources.

Development and Distribution

Before discussing the distribution projects ACPCultures+ has funded, I want to position the program within the field of international development.

Arturo Escobar (1995) argues that the postwar “discovery of poverty” that prompted the creation of development organizations involved a new global division between haves and have-nots in which Southern poverty was understood not simply as a lack of wealth but also as an absence of the social and cultural practices, institutions, and values that characterized the more prosperous North. Poverty, then, in the newly imagined “third world” was a problem to be solved through the distribution of not only Northern resources to the South but more importantly the distribution of social and economic policies, technical knowledge, institutions, and cultural practices. The initiatives of ACPCultures+ are part of this lineage, distributing Northern modes of audiovisual distribution to the Global South and extending Northern media systems and practices to areas that lack them. At the same time, the program departs from development’s usual deployment of media in critical ways.

Early works by development theorists (e.g., Lerner 1958; Schramm 1964) understood media as a way to influence the behavior of those in the South by delivering messages related to development goals, such as educational entertainment programs that highlight sanitation issues or disease prevention. Projects under this modernization-diffusion paradigm were top-down, with little consultation from their intended audiences: they were conceived of and created by Northern development practitioners and distributed to audiences in the South. Eventually, media for development projects began to consider their audiences and involve those in receptor countries in their production and distribution under the participatory paradigm that had become dominant by the mid-1980s (McAnany 2012, 87). Meanwhile, media development focused on creating and strengthening national and regional media systems in developing countries, with aims such as ensuring an independent press and informed citizens. Nevertheless, media continued to be understood instrumentally, as a tool to achieve development and human rights aims, while ignoring the less measurably productive uses of media for entertainment, pleasure, and play in everyday life (Liang 2010; Pearson 2014).

In contrast, entertainment media was taken up in the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) debates within UNESCO, in which developing countries attempted to address the lopsided concentration of media power in the North and its influence on the South (International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems 1980). These debates—which began in the late 1970s and roughly coincided with the entry of American television content, like Hollywood films before it, into international markets and TV sets in developing countries—understood more equitable global media distribution as not only a means of economic growth for developing countries but also an opportunity for “rethinking the relations of periphery to central powers, the fomenting of international trade in media content, . . . and the increasing centrality of media in people’s everyday lives throughout the world” (McAnany 2012, 90). Yet the NWICO’s momentum was derailed by the withdrawal of the United States and the United Kingdom from UNESCO and in the following decades, development aid institutions incorporated free-market conditions into their assistance, such as encouraging developing countries to privatize public services—including broadcast television—to appeal to global private investment (McAnany 2012, 90). Since then, development aid has become increasingly privatized and reliant on public-private partnerships that aim for harmony with, not resistance to, neoliberalism (Wilkins and Enghel 2013).¹

ACPCultures+ points to the contradictions and tensions involved in attempting to alter lopsided global media production and distribution in this era of media privatization, transnational media conglomeration, and increasingly privatized development aid. On one hand, the program can be broadly understood as creating media systems through a participatory paradigm. The ACP Group of States and the EU negotiate to set development goals funded by the European Development Fund. Likewise, ACPCultures+ was conceived of, and is run by, both Europeans and people from the countries in which it funds projects. For instance, ACPCultures+’s selection process involves an open call for applications, with winning projects chosen by an independent committee composed of three voting members of the ACP Secretariat plus a nonvoting committee secretary and president. This selection committee also receives input from the European Commission employees responsible for ACPCultures+ and from specialists in relevant fields. This selection process, thus, draws on standard practices for peer media and arts assessment while ensuring participation and negotiation between ACP and EU participants.

At the same time, ACPCultures+ differs from dominant pairings of media and development in its understanding media as a noninstrumental public good. European Commission employees I talked to echoed the NWICO’s aims, such as improving access to diverse media content for audiences in developing countries by reducing the reach of Hollywood and increasing the global reach and local popularity of industries in ACP countries. Yet ACPCultures+ also prioritizes the adaptation of European distribution norms for new social and economic landscapes in the Global South in a way that is legible and friendly to transnational private investment, while at times excluding locally popular textual forms, industrial practices, and audience preferences. For instance, Nigeria’s successful video film industry Nollywood was seen as outside the scope of ACPCultures+’s mandate because of its perceived industrial and textual dissimilarities from European audiovisual productions. Nollywood’s idiosyncratic industry model strategically uses informality to resist outside investment and integration into formal global circuits of distribution (J. Miller 2016), putting it at odds with the kinds of globally connected systems of formal distribution that, as discussed in the following section, ACPCultures+ has selected for funding. Furthermore, the exclusion of an industry popular with local audiences suggests how even participatory, noninstrumental initiatives to reshape global audiovisual flows can be susceptible to paternalism through the decisions they make about which kinds of audiovisual texts and practices constitute the public good.

Distribution Projects Funded by ACPCultures+

The fourteen distribution projects funded by ACPCultures+ take a broad view of distribution and include film festivals, networking events, digital distribution, and increasing access to international markets. One common feature of these disparate projects is a focus on sidestepping national frameworks, particularly in ways that facilitate both South-South connections and connections between ACP countries and European organizations and industries. These arrangements are the result of ACPCultures+’s requirements, which, like intra-European audiovisual programs such as the MEDIA program, require partners in multiple countries. In addition, for distribution projects, ACPCultures+ will award only up to 80 percent of a project’s budget, further necessitating cooperative arrangements between multiple partners.²

For instance, transnational networking projects attempted to connect distributors across sub-Saharan Africa with those in Europe. The creatively named Mise en réseau de distributeurs et de diffuseurs dans 4 pays (Getting Dealers and Distributors Networked in 4 Countries) networked broadcasters in Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, and France under the direction of the Angers, France-based Cinémas et Cultures d’Afrique, an organization that seeks to develop cultural exchanges between France and Africa and promote the continent’s culture throughout France (ACPFilms 2010, 34). Another, called Animation d’un réseau de télévisions africaines (Animating African Television Networks) aimed to network television distribution professionals throughout francophone West Africa and was headed by the French governmental organization Canal France International (CFI) and supported by Burkina Faso’s FESPACO and Cameroon’s Association Ecrans Noirs, two African film festivals.

Digital projects likewise attempted to create transnational networks of people and information, which included two databases. Mokolo aimed to be a central database for information on African film for both audiences and professionals, and was spearheaded by the Goethe-Institut in partnership with Germany’s Experimental Media Lab at the Academy of Fine Arts, Senegal’s Africa Culture Technologies (simply, the Senegal-based tech staff who contribute to the development and maintenance of Mokolo), Cameroon’s ActivSpaces Association (a tech hub and incubator supported by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs organization Stichting DOEN and the Dutch NGO Hivos), and the Kenyan-based production company Awali Entertainment. The Caribbean Film Database (part of the Caribbean Film Mart project) aimed to do the same for the Caribbean.

In addition to AfricaFilms.TV, which will be discussed in more detail in the following sections, two streaming efforts also received funding. Afrique en Doc TV acquired a catalog of hundred African documentaries for its VOD platform under the leadership of the French organization of the same name, in partnership with Mali’s Be Ka Films, Madagascar’s Endemika Films, Congo’s Inzo Ya Bizizi production house, and France’s HDR Communications. Meanwhile, CaribbeanTales Worldwide Distribution, a distributor based in Barbados and Canada, spearheaded the 3D Distribution Project—which stands for “Digital, Domestic, and Diaspora” distribution—which secured the rights to hundreds of Caribbean and “Caribbean-themed” productions and distributed them through both cable and broadband in the Caribbean, as well as through a transactional VOD platform for the Caribbean diaspora.

Finally, some of ACPCultures+’s initiatives build on a concurrent internationalization of film circulation from these countries through international film festivals. These include the International Images Film Festival for Women, which takes place in Nairobi, Mogadishu, and rural Uganda, and the Île Courts Film Festival, based in Mauritius, Comoros, and Reunion. As Lindiwe Dovey (2015) notes in Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals, film festivals began in Europe but play an important role in supporting the production, distribution, and exhibition of certain kinds of African films. In the late 1990s, there was a new wave of film festivals in Africa, as well as African-themed film festivals throughout Europe. At the same time, major international film festivals like the Toronto International Film Festival began offering programs devoted to African filmmakers (Dovey 2015, 2). With the lack of “formal and robust distribution opportunities both in and beyond the continent,” film festivals serve as “discrete exhibition outlets” that make a wide variety of African films financially viable and socially visible (Dovey 2015, 5).

The transnational nature of these projects reflects ACPCultures+’s status as an EU project. EU cultural policies dealing with audiovisual industries are, by nature, transnational, as they intervene in the relationships between nations within Europe in an attempt to create a common European cultural space and single market capable of competing with U.S. media industries. In reconfiguring the relationship between national sovereignty and cultural policy in the audiovisual field, EU policy adds elements of deregulation and privatization—or désétatisation—to national cultural policy’s protectionism and concern for social development (Beale 1999; Schlesinger 1997). The 1989 Television Without Frontiers Directive, for instance, attempted to provide a common cross-border regulatory framework for broadcasters within the EU, setting quotas for European content and requiring state reciprocity for broadcasters within the EU.³

The geographic orientation of these projects also addresses a “problem” of formal distribution in many ACP countries. As Emilie, who ran an ACPCultures+-funded distribution project in Trinidad and Tobago called the Caribbean Film Mart, told me, Caribbean films “end up in a niche that doesn’t catapult them towards larger audiences or make them any money.” In an attempt to get films distributed beyond that niche, the Caribbean Film Mart at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival provided coaching for selected Caribbean filmmakers on how to pitch their projects to distributors and the chance for 15 filmmakers to meet with distributors from Europe and North and South America, including Magnolia, Tribeca, Sundance, and Cinéma du Monde. Such seemingly contradictory entanglements between American and European audiovisual industries, and between laissez-faire and dirigiste industry models, is a common feature of EU audiovisual policy. For instance, as Upczak shared, the Caribbean Film Mart was modeled on the coproduction market at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), which is itself funded by the EU’s MEDIA program and which likewise connects art house film creators to private co-producers, distributors, and financiers. In the case of the Caribbean Film Mart, more so than encouraging Caribbean filmmakers to adapt to the tastes of execs and audiences in the United States and Europe, the coaching sessions provided filmmakers with tools to help them better participate in a globalized industry marked by diverse and sometimes competing values and practices. The following section will turn in greater detail to a case study that likewise demonstrates the connections between Hollywood, European industry and policy, and development logics in ACPCultures+’s distribution initiatives.

AfricaFilms.TV and MobiCINE+

Of the fourteen distribution projects ACPCultures+ selected since 2008, only one has received funding in each of the three successive rounds of calls for applications: an ambitious project that aimed to create Africa’s first transactional video-on-demand (TVOD) platform coupled with a fleet of mopeds capable of piracy-proof mobile theatrical exhibition. Named AfricaFilms.TV/MobiCINE+, the project was the idea of Enrico Chiesa, an Italian whose background is in independent distribution and exhibition: he was head of Majestic Cinemas in France, a small chain of ten art screens and five multiplexes, and director of the nonprofit Art Cinemas Confederation (CICAE), a network of three thousand independent cinemas. CICAE receives funding from the EU’s MEDIA program, so Chiesa was familiar with the aims and bureaucratic procedures for the EU’s support for audiovisual industries at home. Despite this expertise, he counts AfricaFilms.TV/MobiCINE+ as a qualified failure. Because of a variety of unforeseen factors, the VOD platform is now closed, the mobile distribution units have abandoned projecting cinema, and Chiesa expressed that he himself lost a significant personal sum on the venture.

AfricaFilms.TV and MobiCINE+ are illustrative of ACPCultures+’s distribution initiatives’ aims and tensions—and particularly how these distribution initiatives attempt to simultaneously connect and protect media from ACP countries from global flows of cash and audiovisual content. Furthermore, AfricaFilms.TV is also notable for its failure to become financially viable. Vicki Mayer (2009, 23) has argued that production studies should turn more attention to the examination of failures, particularly as a way to better understand what constitutes success within a particular industrial context. Applying her observation to the study of distribution, the case of AfricaFilms.TV provides insight into how the ACPCultures+ program understands a successful distribution initiative in the Global South, and how that understanding ultimately failed to connect with audiences.

As Ramon Lobato (2012, 6) argues, studies of distribution need to consider audiences: “Who is the audience? How are they constructed as such? What are the material limits that determine which texts are available to which audiences?” Given the history of media and development initiatives deployed by the North onto audiences in the South, this call for attention to audiences is especially true for studies, like this one, that link distribution and development. The case of AfricaFilms.TV/MobiCINE+ reveals competing and overlapping Northern imaginaries of African audiences: as subjects of the development sector’s largesse, as would-be cinephiles held back by lack of access, as diasporas eager to reconnect with familiar media from home, and as consumers to be linked into formal distribution economies.

AfricaFilms.TV and the Scramble for VOD

When ACPCultures+ (then called ACP-Films) issued the call for proposals in 2008 that led to AfricaFilms.TV/MobiCINE+, both the development sector and entrepreneurs and investors were buzzing about the mobile phone boom in Africa that began earlier that decade (Aker and Mbiti 2010). With the rise of smartphones, mobile networks offered the possibility to leapfrog over not only the minimal landline infrastructure of many rural areas but also Internet infrastructure. As Chiesa told me, the promise that mobile networks held was part of the inspiration for AfricaFilms.TV:

Our ambition was to pioneer the field of digital distribution in Africa. In that time in 2008, VOD was just starting. Facebook was still young. The digital landscape for film was not sci-fi, but it was not far from it. We had a great vision, to consider that Africans have a very low rate of television and Internet connection and landlines, but already one could see that tele and mobile were going to grow fast.

AfricaFilms.TV’s application to ACPCultures+ envisioned a not-too-distant future in which the bandwidth required for VOD reached across the continent, thus leapfrogging over another infrastructural hurdle: theatrical distribution. While the continent has 1.25 billion residents, it has only around two hundred movie screens, or about one per six million residents. And with middle-class incomes around $12 a day, theatrical ticket prices of $4 are prohibitively high (Maritz and Probyn 2017). VOD on mobile phones offered a way to connect audiences and content into the formal distribution economy. This was an exciting prospect for those at ACPCultures+; even during my 2013 visit to the program, its administrators were excited about the prospect of Africans streaming films on their mobile phones through VOD platforms that utilized innovative online payment methods.

Despite this optimism for the future of VOD in Africa, however, AfricaFilms.TV found the current tech infrastructure and customer base within much of Africa unable to support the platform. After failed attempts to partner with local telecommunications companies for revenue sharing arrangements from the AfricaFilms.TV catalog, the bandwidth costs proved prohibitively expensive to end users, surpassing the price paid for the audiovisual content purchase itself.

To build the business while African Internet infrastructure caught up, AfricaFilms.TV initially attempted to appeal primarily to two audiences living outside of Africa: the African diaspora living in Europe and North America who Chiesa described as “willing to catch up on TV soaps their families watched in the motherland,” and Northerners “eager to discover African art films and documentaries”. In an interview with the Institut Français in South Africa, Chiesa explained that besides South Africa—a national audience that was “ready” for VOD—his target audience was “The diaspora—Internet maniacs who need a daily direct touch with the homeland—and the cine-buffs interested in Africa” (Diez 2016). In this way, AfricaFilms.TV saw connecting African content with global consumers as critical for the development of sustainable audiovisual industries in sub-Saharan Africa, a characteristic it shares with other programs ACPCultures+ has funded and with other VOD start-ups on the continent, which have also targeted diasporic audiences.

The process of content acquisition for AfricaFilms.TV involved seeking out content that would not only appeal to the imagined tastes of these two intended audiences but was also shaped by existing European and international interests in African film. Initially, the process of securing content was guided by what Chiesa called a “very ‘Western view’ on ‘African cinema’”. Indeed, the gathering of content relied heavily on European resources and prioritized African productions that had already been vetted by European and transnational organizations. For instance, AfricaFilms.TV initially used the database of the France-based African film website Africultures.com to identify acquisition targets and their rights holders. Chiesa found that these films were already held by European distributors and/or the African Film Library, a collection of more than six hundred African films available for pay-per-view from South African broadcaster M-Net, an important force throughout sub-Saharan audiovisual industries.

With AfricaFilms.TV’s relative lack of capital and a business structure based on TVOD service, nonexclusive rights, and revenue sharing with filmmakers, it had no resources to make down payments for these titles to their holders. Still, the venture continued to rely on European understandings of both what kinds of African films were worth showing and what kinds of films African audiences should be shown. AfricaFilms.TV secured additional funding from nonprofits and cultural organizations like the Goethe-Institut to travel to film festivals to obtain African arthouse productions: Africa Doc in Saint-Louis, Senegal in 2009 (funded by a mix of French and Senegalese sources, like the Institut Français and Senegal’s Ministry of Culture); Africa in the Picture in the Netherlands in 2009 (funded by the Municipality of Amsterdam); and the Tri Continental Human Rights Film Festival in Johannesburg in 2010 (funded by the EU, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, South Africa’s Department of Arts and Culture, and other nongovernmental organizations [NGOs] and government agencies). During the same time, AfricaFilms.TV also signed two important catalogs: the popular comedic films made from the late 1960s through the mid-2000s by Ivorian director Henri Duparc (from Les Films Henri Duparc) and nearly two dozen activist documentaries from the South African Uhuru Productions.

By 2012, AfricaFilms.TV had secured a thousand titles, split primarily between documentaries and feature films from francophone West Africa, as well as an assortment of South African films of different genres. Yet because of the factors discussed later, the service only brought in a few thousand dollars in revenue annually. AfricaFilms.TV turned to YouTube (where competitor Iroko.TV got its start), uploading much of its content for free and taking in ad revenue, which ended up being a more profitable distribution model. AfricaFilms.TV continued to acquire content, including approximately three thousand sitcom episodes from Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Senegal, and Ivory Coast in an attempt to appeal to diasporic audiences. The company also continued to search for new content at film festivals and NGOs, securing, for instance, around a hundred titles from the Documentary Film Association of South Africa and the short films that screened at another ACPCultures+ funded project, Île Courts Film Festival in Mauritius (a country with a film industry small enough that this meant most Mauritian productions ever made were now available on the platform). Still, AfricaFilms.TV struggled to get both press and viewers. Appealing to diasporic and cinephile customers proved challenging, in part because of the difficulty of building brand awareness online. “The Internet,” Chiesa told me, “is an ocean that you can’t shed light upon if you don’t own a million suns.” Ultimately, AfricaFilms.TV abandoned the platform altogether, selling the technology they had developed to a competitor, Buni.TV.

Although it was the first attempt at VOD in Africa, AfricaFilms.TV faced competition early on. Within Europe, inexpensive satellite packages provided multiple channels of francophone African content for diasporic audiences. Satellite also increased its presence within Africa, as in 2012, Canal Plus began offering a satellite TV service in twenty sub-Saharan Francophone countries and Ghana, which provides film and TV shows from Europe alongside European-African co-productions and African films. Soon after AfricaFilms.TV was launched, new VOD ventures also emerged. Buni.TV followed a model much like AfricaFilms.TV before being acquired by French-based “international urban” station Trace TV in 2016 (Vourlias 2016). Afrostream, founded in 2015 and shuttered in September 2017 (Bakang 2017) advertised itself as the place to watch the “best black films and TV shows”—including Hollywood hits like Django Unchained and Boyz n the Hood (Aylee 2017), and current American TV shows like Black-ish (The Walt Disney Company France 2016)—to European subscribers before expanding to twenty-four African countries and securing investment from French telco Orange (Dillet 2016). The most successful African VOD venture is IrokoTV.com, founded by Briton of Nigerian descent Jason Njoku, which acquired exclusive online rights to five thousand English-language Nollywood productions, which it streamed on YouTube for free, gaining a large following before launching a mobile-only subscription platform and securing nearly $40 million from investors including U.S. hedge fund Tiger Global (Oluwafemi 2016). It recently partnered with France’s Canal Plus to make a mobile-only subscription VOD platform targeting francophone Africa (Keslassy 2015).

AfricaFilms.TV would not have existed without ACPCultures+’s support of more than $1 million dollars: Chiesa says the project was “stimulated by the possibility of getting funding” from ACPCultures+. At the same time, AfricaFilms.TV’s origins as an EU-sponsored development initiative proved to be a constraint in the increasingly crowded VOD field. First, while other VOD ventures made use of diverse international resources, because of what Chiesa called “ideological reasons,” AfricaFilms.TV moved its technological development operations from Paris to Dakar to develop a truly African app with African partners. While Iroko also based its tech operations—including nearly twenty developers—in Africa, Chiesa credits AfricaFilms.TV’s move with difficulties in the platform that resulted in only seven hundred titles in its four-thousand-deep library getting uploaded. Second, because of AfricaFilms.TV’s developmental mandate, its catalog differed from those of its competition. Iroko offered popular Nollywood content in a modern streaming format, while Buni.tv and Afrostream offered African content alongside black media from the Americas and Europe. As an ACPCultures+ funded project, however, AfricaFilms.TV necessarily valued arthouse over commercial and acquired content that was strictly geographically bounded and that had been vetted by Northern organizations supporting art, development, and human rights.

MobiCINE+: Mobile Distribution between Cinema and NGOs

While AfricanFilms.TV envisioned a global solution to the problem of African distribution, MobiCINE+ thought locally. The program created mobile cinemas: mopeds mounted with projectors and computers. In itself, this was not innovative. Europe had deployed mobile cinemas to Africa for nearly a century, first as a means to project colonial power, and later as delivery methods for educational development documentaries and instructional films (Larkin 2008). MobiCINE+, however, aimed for a different kind of control: digital rights management (DRM). MobiCINE+ used AfricaFilms.TV’s VOD protections to ensure that films could not be copied or even shown multiple times without payment. Like Chiesa, program managers in Brussels saw piracy as a “big problem for ACP movies”, an obstacle to the development of formal distribution systems and local audiovisual industries.

Chiesa attributed the widespread closure of African cinemas in part to both piracy and to ticket fraud, which prevented distributors from being compensated. MobiCINE+ attempted to address both issues while promising a solution to much of sub-Saharan Africa’s lack of theatrical exhibition infrastructure. The program loaned its mobile units to operators, each having undergone two weeks of training, who were themselves then responsible for finding audiences in cities in Senegal and Mali. Chiesa envisioned these operators as “bottom of the pyramid entrepreneurs who would go from place to place, from schools to cultural places, to screen films for roughly 20 cents.” The operators collected and kept the ticket sales themselves but paid MobiCINE+ for a token to unlock each file for the duration of each screening. According to Chiesa, “The business model was to say, we don’t want to control ticketing, we just want to sell to a guy on his motorbike. This model was no longer based on the audience paying for a ticket—that wasn’t our problem anymore.”

The program aimed to have more than a thousand such units operating across francophone Africa. Ultimately, however, many of the same issues that stymied AfricaFilms.TV made MobiCINE+’s original model untenable. In particular, since MobiCINE+ drew on AfricaFilms.TV’s library, they were unable to show the kind of content that was in demand with urban francophone audiences: Hollywood blockbusters and, to a lesser extent, very recent African releases. AfricaFilms.TV had talks with Disney and United Artists in 2010 in an attempt to screen their films, but the studios were wary of the program. From his experience in France, Chiesa told me he had learned that Hollywood films can help to prop up the distribution of smaller domestic productions: “Not one cinema in France could show French indies without the money from American blockbusters—and it’s the same in Africa. You don’t want to create a ghetto—you want to have films people want to watch. We had a supply problem, with no American films.” Indeed, throughout my fieldwork, African audiovisual professionals expressed the desire to have their films shown alongside Hollywood and European productions in theaters, film festivals, and streaming services.

This supply problem speaks to a larger disjuncture between Chiesa’s understanding of MobiCINE+ and that of the European Commission. In interviews, ACPCultures+ administrators touted the project’s ability to show African films to rural African audiences while minimizing its potential for profitability.

They project it to the village. Not for payment, but for participation with work, or with food, even food for the technicians. So, people don’t even have to pay necessarily. So the children and young people and older people, they can see their own images. It’s good.

Chiesa meanwhile, was clear about MobiCINE+ being a business venture that catered to media-savvy urbanites with disposable income for entertainment: “It’s not NGO-based, to show films in the bush, but big screens in the city to people who worked there and were eager to pay money for it.”

Ultimately, however, Chiesa decided to switch modes and use MobiCINE+ literally in the service of NGOs. While simultaneously attempting to pitch the mobile cinema units’ potential for promotional events to global brands like Nestle and Unilever—an effort that found limited success—Chiesa also began selling MobiCINE+’s services to show educational documentaries, primarily in elementary schools around Dakar. The city’s government, in partnership with international NGOs and the embassies of the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain, enthusiastically supported the screenings, and over the course of four years, MobiCINE+ had shown more than four thousand films in schools. The films were primarily short documentaries by mostly African directors, covered social issues like child marriage, and they were shown to audiences of around sixty children aged five to twelve years old for 20 Euros per screening. Chiesa says that this venture into the NGO sector was the most profitable of any of AfricaFilms.TV or MobiCINE+’s activities, but he seems to find at least as much consolation in the “strong cultural impact” the program had. Despite MobiCINE+ ending up “so far from cinema,” he was proud that for some in its young audience, it was the “largest projected image” they would see, “their first documentary,” or their “first African film”.

Conclusion

This article has shown how ACPCultures+’s attempts to bring formal audiovisual distribution to developing countries involve complex entanglements with Hollywood, European film industries, EU audiovisual policies, and international development. While attempting to ameliorate lopsided global media flows and reduce the influence of Hollywood in developing countries, ACPCultures+ replicates European dirigiste notions of an audiovisual public good and understandings of what constitutes formal distribution, including integration into global circuits of commercial distribution. Meanwhile, through ACPCultures+’s participatory structure and its focus on noninstrumental media, the program attempts to account for critiques of development’s paternalistic framing of those in the South as in need of improvement. Nevertheless, as the case of AfricaFilms.TV/MobiCINE+ illustrates, this intertwining of dirigisme with development can constrain distribution initiatives’ ability to engage with commercial markets and the desires of local audiences.

ACPCultures+, then, speaks to the difficulties in escaping paternalism altogether in contemporary efforts to reconfigure inequitable global media distribution through development aid. Yet as Wilkins and Enghel (2013, 167) argue, development is a “complex process” that asks us to “recognize that some interventions improve conditions in substantial ways without disregarding shortcomings.” The case of AfricaFilms.TV/MobiCINE+ is particularly illustrative here: its failure may show the limitations of development-funded formal distribution initiatives, but subsequent and more commercially successful VOD ventures like iROKO have built on its innovations, such as appealing to diasporic audiences and working with local telecoms to make mobile streaming more affordable for customers, while appealing to popular audience tastes. Future development assistance for formal distribution would do well to foreground local audiences in attempting to create more equitable global media flows.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received support for this research from the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia at the University of Michigan and the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan.

Notes

ORCID iD

Benjamin A. J. Pearson

Author Biography

Benjamin A. J. Pearson completed his PhD in communication studies at the University of Michigan. His research deals with the relationship between media industries and cultural policy in an era of globalization, and his current project focuses on European Union policies aimed at audiovisual industries in developing countries.

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