Cameroon's Lionesses Just Won Their First WAFCON: Here's the Sports Films You Should Be Watching Right Now
- Sahndra Fon Dufe
- 15 hours ago
- 6 min read
After three heartbreaking final losses across two decades, Cameroon's Indomitable Lionesses finally have a trophy of their own. We break down the win and use the moment to ask a harder question: where are the films about women like them?
On August 16, in Rabat, Morocco, Cameroon's women's national football team beat Malawi 3-0 to win the 2026 Women's Africa Cup of Nations. It is the first WAFCON title in the history of the program, and it did not come easily. This was Cameroon's fourth appearance in a WAFCON final. They lost the previous three, in 2004, 2014, and 2016. This time, the Indomitable Lionesses did not just win. They dominated.
The bigger picture: women's football is rising across Africa, and the industry hasn't caught up
Cameroon's win did not happen in isolation. This WAFCON also gave us Malawi's first-ever final appearance, Cabo Verde's first-ever qualification to the tournament, and a 16-team format that, for the first time, gave more federations a real shot at the continental stage. Women's football in Africa is professionalizing in real time: more countries qualifying, more federations investing, more players moving into paid contracts abroad. But visibility, media coverage, and cultural narrative still lag far behind the men's game, and that gap is exactly where the film industry should be stepping in.
Sport is one of the few arenas where Black women's excellence is undeniable and quantifiable. A goal is a goal. A gold medal is a gold medal. There is no room for the industry to argue the numbers away. And yet when that excellence gets adapted into film and television, the results, when they happen at all, tend to become genuine cultural landmarks: King Richard earned Will Smith an Academy Award. The Fire Inside premiered at TIFF to a 94% Rotten Tomatoes score. These are not niche stories. They are proof of appetite. What's missing is volume, investment, and the will to greenlight more of them, especially stories rooted outside the United States, on the African continent itself.
This is Black Film Wire's position: moments like Cameroon's WAFCON win are not just sports headlines. They are IP. They are the kind of story investors, studios, and streamers should already be circling, and the kind of African creative industries should be building toward telling ourselves, on our own terms, rather than waiting for someone else to option the rights.
The final: how the Lionesses finally got it done
The game was effectively decided before halftime. Marie Ngah scored twice, bookending a goal from Naomi Ndjoah Eto, to put Cameroon up 3-0 inside the first 45 minutes. Ngah's tournament tally now sits level with Barbra Banda and Temwa Chawinga at the top of the WAFCON goalscoring chart. Malawi, playing in their first-ever WAFCON final as tournament debutants, never found an answer. Cameroon's second half was a masterclass in game management, absorbing pressure and running the clock without ever looking rattled.
The bigger story is how Cameroon even got to Rabat. They initially failed to qualify for the tournament outright. It was only CAF's decision to expand WAFCON from 12 to 16 teams that gave them a route in. From there, they beat Ghana in the group stage, eliminated ten-time champions Nigeria 1-0 in the quarterfinals, and knocked out host nation Morocco on penalties after a scoreless draw in the semifinal, a shootout in which goalkeeper Michaely Bihina made four penalty saves across extra time and the shootout combined. Cameroon conceded just two goals across the entire tournament and none at all in the knockout rounds. That defensive record, and Bihina's semifinal heroics have made her one of the most talked-about players of the tournament.
With the win, Cameroon becomes only the fourth nation in WAFCON history to lift the trophy, joining Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, and South Africa.
Know your Lionesses: quick trivia
Nickname: Les Lionnes Indomptables (The Indomitable Lionesses)
Founded: The program's first official international match was a 2-0 loss to Nigeria in Lagos on June 15, 1991, meaning this trophy arrives 35 years into the team's history.
Head coach: Alain Djeumfa
Captain: Christine Manie
Most caps and all-time top scorer: Madeleine Ngono Mani, with 87 caps and 40 goals
World Cup history: Two appearances (2015, 2019), with a Round of 16 finish in both
Olympics: One appearance, at London 2012, exiting in the group stage
Prior WAFCON finals: 2004, 2014, 2016, all losses, until now
The other Lions: how this stacks up against the men's team
Cameroonian football fans grew up with a different set of Lions. The men's Indomitable Lions have won five Africa Cup of Nations titles, in 1984, 1988, 2000, 2002, and 2017, second only to Egypt's seven. Their defining moment on the world stage came in 1990, when a 38-year-old Roger Milla, recalled from international retirement, helped Cameroon become the first African nation to ever reach a World Cup quarterfinal, beating defending champions Argentina in the tournament opener along the way.
That is the shadow the Lionesses have played under for three and a half decades: a men's program with global World Cup legend status and a women's program that had never once closed out a final. The comparison is not about which team is "better." It's about what gets built, funded, and celebrated first, and what that says about how a country invests in its women athletes. The men had their World Cup miracle in year 30 of the federation's existence. The women have waited 35 years for their first continental trophy and had to survive a format expansion just to get the chance to win it. That gap, more than the scoreline, is the real story.
That gap between the men's legacy and the women's long climb to a first trophy is exactly the kind of story film has told before, for other athletes, in other countries. Here's proof the appetite already exists.
Sports films to watch: the ones that got made
King Richard (2021) Will Smith plays Richard Williams, father and coach to Venus and Serena Williams, chronicling the family's rise from Compton, California to the top of world tennis. Smith won the Best Actor Oscar for the role at the 94th Academy Awards, cementing King Richard as the benchmark for what a Black women's sports biopic can achieve commercially and critically.
Venus and Serena (2012) A documentary that goes behind the Hollywood gloss of King Richard, following the sisters through a defining year in their careers, personal lives included.
Love & Basketball (2000) Sanaa Lathan and Gina Prince-Bythewood's fictional drama about a girl chasing a professional basketball career while navigating love, ambition, and the limits placed on women in the sport. Still considered the genre-defining Black women's sports film two and a half decades later.
A Most Beautiful Thing (2020) A documentary on the first all-Black high school rowing team in U.S. history, out of Chicago's West Side, and the young men who built it. (Note: this one centers young men, not women, but it's a frequently cited companion piece in this genre for its treatment of Black access to historically white sports; worth a mention for context rather than as a Black-women-led entry.)
Simone Biles Rising (2024) A Netflix docuseries following the gymnastics superstar's mental health journey and her return to Olympic competition, going beyond the medal count into what it costs to carry "greatest of all time" status in public.
Naomi Osaka (2021) A Netflix docuseries that trades pure triumph narrative for something more complicated: tennis, yes, but also press scrutiny, identity, and burnout.
The Gabby Douglas Story (2014) A Lifetime biopic starring Imani Hakim and Regina King, tracing gymnast Gabby Douglas's path from Virginia Beach to becoming the first Black gymnast in Olympic history to win the Individual All-Around title, and the first American gymnast to win gold in both the individual all-around and team events at the same Olympics.
The Fire Inside (2024) Ryan Destiny stars as boxer Claressa Shields in this Amazon MGM biopic, directed by Rachel Morrison and written by Barry Jenkins. Shields became the first American woman to win Olympic gold in boxing in 2012, then made history again in 2016 as the first American boxer, male or female, to win consecutive Olympic gold medals.
Althea (2014) A documentary on Althea Gibson, the first Black player to compete at and win Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals in the 1950s, years before Arthur Ashe broke the same barriers on the men's side. A quieter film than the others on this list, but foundational to the whole genre.
Bonus, and not Black women, but worth the mention: Bend It Like Beckham (2002) follows a British-Indian teenager fighting her family's expectations to play football. It is not our lane, culturally, but it's proof the appetite for "girl from a diaspora family defies the odds to play the sport she loves" stories has existed in the mainstream for over twenty years. The industry knows this story sells. It just hasn't matched that appetite to Black women's stories, especially African ones, at anywhere near the same scale.
Where's the gap?
Every film on that list above is about an American athlete, with the partial exception of Bend It Like Beckham. Cameroon's Lionesses just made history on African soil, in an African competition, and there is no film, no docuseries, no scripted feature circling any of these women or this program. That's not a criticism of any one studio. It's a market gap, and market gaps are opportunities.
We'll be watching to see who moves first.
Know of an opportunity for Black or African stories in sports film and media? We want to hear about it.
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