Six Takeaways From the Joburg Film Festival and JBX Market

The 7th edition of the Joburg Film Festival came to a close Saturday night, bringing an end to a busy week that saw the festival and its parallel industry event, JBX, make strides in establishing themselves as what festival founder Timothy Mangwedi is determined to transform into “the number one pop-culture, must-attend event in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Across the three-day JBX, or Joburg Xchange, representatives of the South African and global screen industries explored ways to bolster cross-border collaboration, wrestled with thorny issues involving copyright law, AI and workers’ rights, and sought to ensure that African narratives remain in the hands of African storytellers. Meanwhile, a full-day program presented in collaboration with Sisters Working in Film and Television (SWIFT) showcased the advances made by women in the South African screen industries while highlighting how much remains to be done on the road to gender parity.

Here are six of Variety’s key takeaways from a spirited week in Johannesburg: 

Made in Joburg

The theme of this year’s JBX — “made in Joburg for Africa and the world” — highlights the event’s efforts to position Johannesburg as a key driver in South Africa’s screen industries. “We wanted to create the number one pop-culture, must-attend event in sub-Saharan Africa,” said Joburg Film Festival chief Timothy Mangwedi, whose broader goal is to make the three-day confab a transformative tool “to grow the TV and film industry in Africa.”

While the local industry is struggling (more on that below), Netflix reiterated its commitment to South African storytellers at an event celebrating a new partnership between the streaming giant and the festival. “Joburg — my favorite city in the world — and the greater Gauteng province play a vital role in the growth of the local film industry,” said Ben Amadasun, the streamer’s VP of content in the Middle East and Africa. Amadasun highlighted a number of Netflix originals filmed in Johannesburg, including the upcoming six-part drama series “GO!,” insisting that the streamer’s doing its part “to put Joburg on the map.”

South Africans sound the alarm

As Variety reported this week from Johannesburg, South African filmmakers are up in arms over their beleaguered cash rebate system, with the Dept. of Trade, Industry and Competition (DTIC) — the government body tasked with overseeing the rebate — on the hook for untold millions of dollars in unpaid claims. Aggrieved filmmakers say the DTIC has kept them in the dark over the delays, and industry bodies, who recently marched on the the department’s offices in the capital of Pretoria, delivered a memorandum outlining a list of demands — chief among them resolving debts that have put many production companies to the brink of bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, Cape Town’s production services industry is trying to weather the storm by banking on its reputation for delivering world-class bang for your buck, with Marisa Sonemann-Turner, COO of Film Afrika, telling Variety her team has now “moved away from the reliance on the rebate [in negotiations] and focused more on the value for money that we can offer,” highlighting South Africa’s relatively low production costs and favorable exchange rate. In an industry famous for its resilience, local filmmakers are nevertheless trying to stay upbeat, with Nomsa Philiso, CEO of general entertainment for MultiChoice, insisting: “People are very optimistic. No one is throwing in the towel.”

Trump’s long shadow

With a South African billionaire pushing widely discredited conspiracy theories in the White House and U.S. President Trump amplifying those falsehoods, attendees at the Joburg Film Festival were painfully aware that the power of storytelling could just as easily be employed to do harm instead of good. South African actor and filmmaker Mmabatho Montsho was among those calling out the “revisionist history” being promoted by the rightwing Afrikaner organization AfriForum, whose lies about a “genocide” against white Afrikaner farmers prompted Trump to offer that group political asylum. “There has never been a moment in our lives as crucial and as important as this moment,” said filmmaker Vusi Africa (“Surviving Gaza”), who blamed the “whitewashing of South African history” for allowing “radical organizations like AfriForum to distort the narrative.”

Also this week, Oscar-nominated Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck (“I Am Not Your Negro”) blasted the Trump administration for dismantling the alliances that have bolstered the post-war political order, putting millions of lives at risk. “We are in the hands of a bunch of crazy people who have an agenda that was totally written out in Project 2025, the same way that Hitler wrote ‘Mein Kampf,’” Peck told Variety. “All of it was there to read, and everybody thought he was making a joke. No. They are applying what they said they were going to do.”

Crossing borders

While the Joburg event was designed to foster pan-African collaboration and dialogue, all agree that more work needs to be done, with Terrence Khumalo, of South Africa’s National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), noting that most African producers are more focused on co-producing with Europe and America than each other. “We’re still thinking along colonial lines,” he said. “We only meet once or twice [a year] in Cannes, Berlin. It’s only outside of the continent. We need to see an improvement.” While few African countries have signed formal co-production treaties with each other, Khumalo stressed how filmmakers in countries like Nigeria and Kenya have leveraged private equity to work with South African partners.

Meanwhile, Unathi Malunga, of the South African Screen Federation (SASFED), noted how industry bodies across the continent are looking at measures like the African Continental Free Trade Agreement to help facilitate cross-border collaboration, lobbying around issues such as work visas and import duties for film equipment. “We are concerned with creating an environment that’s conducive for producers to thrive,” she said.

An AI battle looms

AI is “coming whether we like it or not,” documentary filmmaker Thandi Davids stressed this week at JBX, and it’s imperative that African creators are part of the conversation. “As people are feeding the machines in the Global North,” she said, Africans must make sure that they’re “contributing to AI with our visuals, our images, our shared history.” At the policy level, the battle is just beginning. “Lawmakers are always playing catch-up to technological developments,” said SASFED’s Malunga, who noted that government bodies “like to ignore the [film and TV] sector” when crafting laws that could affect thousands of livelihoods. Industry guilds have already begun lobbying to ensure policymakers have a clear understanding of how “AI affects the whole value chain,” Malunga added, insisting: “[They’re] not going to ignore us this time.”

While it’s unclear how soon South African officials will create a much-needed regulatory framework — “Our copyright act has been in review for around 18 years,” noted producer Marc Schwinges — Known Associates CEO Tshepiso Chikapa-Phiri was among those who said they’re “not sure that [legislators are] going to respond in the right way.” The industry has no choice but to move forward in the meantime, with Schwinges noting: “We have to accept it. We have to embrace it. We have to work with it as best we can.”

African stories told by African storytellers

Jennifer Okafor-Iwuchukwu, a literary and talent manager formerly with CAA, recalled driving down Sunset Blvd. recently and seeing a billboard for “Classified,” Prime Video’s teen drama set in a South African boarding school. “That’s never happened before,” Okafor-Iwuchukwu said this week at JBX. Indeed, while it wasn’t long ago that Marvel’s “Black Panther” — a Hollywood blockbuster filmed in Atlanta about a fictional African nation — was seen as a watershed moment for African creatives, a better bellwether could be “The Black Book,” an independently financed action thriller from Nigeria that cracked Netflix’s top 10 in dozens of countries.

Okafor-Iwuchukwu cited the film as an example of “making sure that our stories are going to be told in the most authentic way possible,” highlighting the challenge for African storytellers at a time when there are more pathways to worldwide success than ever before. “What are your cultural roots and how will you stay true to them while appealing to that global audience?” she asked. South African director Vusi Africa (“Surviving Gaza”), meanwhile, called on his fellow filmmakers to make movies “that carry our hope, that carry who we are, that carry our history and that drive us on to move forward,” adding: “We have a very great responsibility on our shoulders to…tell the story of Africa to the world.”

The Joburg Film Festival runs March 11 – 16.