Nine Projects. Two Thousand Submissions. The Next Narrative Africa Fund Has Made Its First Bets and They Raise a Question Worth Asking.
- Sahndra Fon Dufe
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
A $50 million fund. Nine projects. Filmmakers with Cannes, Neon, Netflix, and Venice already on their résumés. The Next Narrative Africa Fund's inaugural slate raises a question its own mission demands we ask
The Next Narrative Africa Fund has announced its inaugural slate. Nine projects. Drawn from more than 2,000 submissions across 80 countries. The names attached are impressive: Trevor Noah, Rapman, Thuso Mbedu, André Holland, the Esiri Brothers. The projects are ambitious. The fund itself, a $50 million initiative founded by former diplomat and media executive Akunna Cook, is structured to do something genuinely different: $10 million in development grants for scripts, and a $40 million commercial fund that deploys equity once a project is ready to go to market.
According to Black Film Wire, it is one of the most consequential financing structures aimed specifically at African storytelling to emerge in the current decade. The architecture is sound. The intent is serious. And the inaugural slate deserves to be reported as exactly what it is: a credible, well-resourced opening statement from a fund that has set its own bar high.
That said, the bar it has set invites a real question. And we are going to ask it.
Who Got In? And Where We've Seen Them Before
Let's be precise about the nine, because the details matter.
Trevor Noah (Beyond Day Zero, South Africa) needs little introduction, but the project does. The action film follows the daughter of a powerful water tycoon who joins forces with a township gangster to challenge the system. Screenplay by Amy Jephta, one of South Africa's sharpest working writers. Noah produces through his Day Zero Productions company, which has been building a film and television pipeline since his departure from The Daily Show. His entry here is not that of a celebrity attaching himself to a project, it reflects a production outfit making a deliberate push into feature cinema.
Rapman (Untitled Political Thriller, Sierra Leone-UK) is the British-Sierra Leonean filmmaker born Andrew Onwubolu, whose trajectory in five years has been remarkable. He built a following with his self-distributed Shiro's Story trilogy on YouTube before landing Blue Story in UK cinemas in 2019 and creating Netflix's Supacell, a grounded superhero drama set in South London that became one of the streamer's most discussed British originals. His NNAF project, a Sierra Leone-set political drama about a young soldier unexpectedly thrust into power, is a tonal departure that signals where he wants to go next.
The Esiri Brothers Arie and Chuko (Innocent, Nigeria) are the Lagos-born, London-based directing and writing duo behind Eyimofe (This Is My Desire), which won the FIPRESCI Prize at Berlin in 2021 and became one of the most critically discussed Nigerian films of the decade. Their NNAF entry is a Lagos whodunit. Of note: their forthcoming film Clarissa, starring Sophie Okonedo, David Oyelowo, and Ayo Edebiri, was recently acquired by Neon for U.S. theatrical release. They are, in the most precise sense of the term, already in the pipeline.
Thuso Mbedu (Untitled Action Drama, South Africa) starred opposite Viola Davis in Sony Pictures' The Woman King (2022) and led Barry Jenkins' The Underground Railroad for Amazon before that. Her NNAF project which she stars in, co-writes, and produces follows two fashion models who mastermind a heist to steal government gold jewelry to buy back ancestral land. It is directed by Amanda Lane, whose credits include episodes of Station Eleven and The Watcher. Mbedu is one of the most internationally recognized African actors working today. Her presence here raises the fund's commercial profile considerably.
André Holland (United States of Africa, Ghana) is the American actor best known for Moonlight, The Knick, and Castle Rock, serving as executive producer on this Cold War-era Ghanaian spy series created by British-Ghanaian writer-director Carl Kwesi Earl-Ocran. Earl-Ocran is the relative unknown on this list, a London-based filmmaker whose short films Arachnid and Hackney Downs ran the international festival circuit, who was selected for the inaugural BAFTA Connect network in 2022, and who runs a small independent production company in London. He is the emerging voice in this pairing. Holland is the infrastructure around him.
Mohamed Kordofani (About Love & September Laws, Sudan) directed Goodbye Julia, the Sudanese drama that became the first Sudanese film to screen in Competition at Cannes, in 2023, and went on to win the Freedom Prize in Un Certain Regard. He is an established filmmaker by any international measure, though his profile outside festival circles remains smaller than many of the names above. His NNAF project is set in 1983 Sudan as Sharia Law takes hold urgent historical material, co-written with Khaled Alwaleed.
Boma Iluma (Untitled Sci-Fi Romance, Nigeria) is, on this list, the name closest to genuinely emerging. He grew up between Abuja, Nigeria and Atlanta, Georgia, studied theater, cinema and International Relations at USC, and built his career through a short film Comfort selected for Lena Waithe's Rising Voices Fellowship that premiered at Tribeca 2021 and was acquired by Amazon Prime Video. Roman Coppola subsequently handpicked him to write and direct a segment in The Seven Faces of Jane. In 2022 he made his television debut on The Chi, directing four episodes and becoming one of the network's youngest directors. He was included on Forbes' 2025 30 Under 30 in Hollywood & Entertainment. His NNAF project, a near-future Nigeria where aliens live alongside humans is his first feature. He belongs on this list. The question is how many more like him there are, and whether they got in.
Zoey Martinson (Comedy Horror, Ghana) is frequently described in early coverage as an emerging filmmaker. The record is more complicated. She has directed for A24, HBO Max, and Hulu/Disney+. Her debut feature The Fisherman screened at the 81st Venice Biennale and earned the UNESCO Fellini Medal. Western Union She was among the ten female directing finalists on Issa Rae's Project Greenlight. She is a working, internationally credentialed filmmaker whose genre comedy project Gen Z friends accidentally disrespecting an ancient deity on vacation sounds like exactly the kind of commercially viable African story the fund says it wants.
The Benchmark
The NNAF is not operating in isolation. The African film funding landscape has been expanding, and it is worth understanding where this fund sits within it.
Afreximbank's $1 billion Africa Film Fund, announced through its development investment arm FEDA, is designed to promote production and global distribution of high-quality African films and TV series. It is the largest capital commitment to African cinema in history and, as several producers noted at Durban recently, it remains largely inaccessible to most African filmmakers, with barriers to entry that are too high for the independent mid-tier.
The Red Sea Fund has supported over 280 films since 2021, with a model that opens to Arab, African, and Asian filmmakers across fiction, documentary, and animation, including first-time directors. The Realness Institute and the Durban FilmMart Fellowship have consistently prioritized first and second features from emerging voices on the continent itself. The EAccelerate Fund, run by the East Africa Screen Collective, operates at smaller scale — grants of up to €20,000, but its cohort is made up entirely of filmmakers still building toward their first significant platform.
The NNAF's commercial slate sits at the far end of that range. It is not a discovery fund. It is, by design and by outcome, a bet on names with market traction. That is not a criticism — it is a structural choice, and the fund's architects are entitled to make it. Development money has to come back. Equity requires a rationale.
But when a fund receives 2,000 submissions from 80 countries and announces nine projects, the composition of those nine is itself a statement about what the fund believes is commercially viable in African storytelling. And the nine here skew, heavily, toward filmmakers who already have access to the rooms this fund is meant to open.
The Question the Fund Invites
The NNAF's inaugural commercial slate is impressive by any measure. The question it raises: one the fund's own mission invites is whether development support attached to names already in Neon's acquisition pipeline fills the gap the continent's emerging voices actually face, or whether it validates a market that was already moving.
The answer may lie in the 125 scripts the venture studio plans to support over five years. Those names, when they are announced, will tell the fuller story.
What we want to see next: transparency about the grant-side cohort, a visible commitment to filmmakers outside Lagos, Accra, Cape Town, and London, and a second slate that reflects the full breadth of the 2,000 people who believed enough in this fund to submit.
The ambition is right. The infrastructure is serious. The capital is real. Now let's see what it opens.
The Next Narrative Africa Fund was founded by Akunna Cook. Nine projects were selected from 2,000+ submissions across 80 countries. The commercial fund will finance up to 20% of any one budget across a projected slate of 20–25 projects. The development grant program aims to support approximately 125 scripts over five years.
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