If such a thing as royalty exists in African cinema, very few people can lay claim to it in the way Steven Markovitz can. He has worked around the continent, produced a surfeit of films, and, as he tells me, his company, Big World Cinema, has worked with filmmakers from over 30 countries.
That’s a number that pleases me in the context of an interview arranged to discuss Big World’s 30th anniversary. If you think of modern African cinema as an entity that came of age in the 1990s, then Markovitz was there to see its South African offspring totter.
“When we started in 1994,” he says soon after he appears on my laptop screen, “South Africa had just attained democracy, and we thought the world would change overnight. We were a little naïve. We thought the film industry would change overnight and it would all start happening. It’s taken a lot longer than we anticipated.”
Back then, Markovitz was working for the BBC and other western broadcasters as a fixer, helping them get stories about the Apartheid. But at some point, he was no longer satisfied with the job. “I just got tired of helping foreigners tell our stories. I said I can’t carry on doing this; we have to start making our own films—films that reflect a reality from the perspective of South Africans.”
But it was a novel idea. A lot of what was available at the time was state propaganda. No NFVF and no real relationship with the rest of Africa and Europe. No co-production treaties. “The whole thing had to be formed from scratch. And we all had to scratch around for work.”
Big World Cinema and the rest of Africa
That has changed. There’s now private money and the business of streaming. In some ways, South Africa’s film industry is the envy of others on the continent. Last year, when Netflix scaled back resources expended on Nollywood, some of the chatter was about how the streaming platform wasn’t doing the same in South Africa. Big World itself hasn’t done quite as much producing in West Africa. I ask why this is so.
“I am not going to take that personally,” Markovitz says with a near-invisible grin. But he explains that his company has done significant work outside of South Africa for about half of its lifetime for three reasons. First, there was an abundance of talent outside of his country as good film schools around the world were graduating directors who were coming back to their countries, but not a lot of people wanted to be producers. There was also the little matter of politics as it plays out in South Africa.
“South Africans behave like the Americans of Africa. We think that because we got lots of money…we are quite arrogant and there is a strong xenophobic streak in our country. I felt it was important to build bridges in an equal way with filmmakers from across the continent.”
The third reason, he says, was connected to something he observed outside of the continent. “If you look at Europe, they produce with themselves every day. Look at how Hollywood was built. They went to Europe to hire people like Billy Wilder and all these top European directors and brought them to Hollywood to make films.
“I see nationalistic filmmaking as not a great way to grow an industry and I’m quite agnostic about where people are from. It’s just ‘Do we want to work together? Do we need things from each other? Can we find a way?
“So, for me, it was about building those bridges. South Africa obviously has some infrastructure. There’s some finance, there’s a skills base. I try to marry that with creative talent, technical talent, and stories from across the continent.”
He returns to my question about his relative lack of presence in West Africa “just to dispel” my claim. Big World has now worked with directors from over 30 countries, he says, including 8 or 10 countries from my region. He will name them “just to shame” me. He begins. “Togo, Benin, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, Mauritania…” I count with him; that’s six.
“I’m in trouble!” he exclaims. “Niger, Cape Verde, Senegal is nine. I’m getting there.”
Finally, amid laughter, he relents and says that his company has indeed done several projects in East Africa in recent years. “We would love to work more in West Africa and are constantly looking for projects.”
That’s that then.
The Mubi of Africa?
But how will a filmmaker looking to work with him find him? He’s easy to find, he says. He’s on social media and has “had the same email address for probably 30 years”.
So, for any filmmaker looking to work with Big World, here is what to do. Find that 30-year-old email address. Send an email with a project, telling Markovitz exactly what stage of production you are at. It is very important that you state this. Big World doesn’t like receiving scripts without contexts. Oh! And instead of sharing a script, share a link to previous work alongside a deck. If the company likes what it sees, you will be asked to send a script.
That said, production is one thing, distribution is another. And the latter is likely a bigger problem on the continent. Some of the best projects made by Africans are hardly seen in Africa. Without access to IDFA, it’s unlikely many Africans will see great documentaries from and about the continent. And some of the most ambitious young African filmmakers will never have their feature films seen by their countrymen, if those countrymen don’t get to Sundance or some other festival out west.
“It is a problem of the economy of our films and the distribution network around them,” Markovitz says. He mentions the African Screen Network, a project that had a bit of buzz about a decade ago. Apparently, it was supposed to solve this problem by bringing films that had thrived in Berlin or Cannes to its partners in different countries, but the economics of the arrangement never quite made sense. Perhaps mercifully, Covid killed it off.
“I think there is a gap for an online platform,” he says. “A Mubi of Africa. Something like that. Or like an African documentary channel. It is worth trying to build.”
But that’s not the only thing to work on. “Not just in Africa but around the world, if you say to your friend let’s go and watch an African film on Friday night, it is a tough sell because the image of our films is still seen like homework or medicine. You often go to watch it because you have to not out of a real desire. So, I still think African film has a branding problem that we have to tackle. That can only happen with concerted operating among all of us, There isn’t enough operation and coordination between us.
“So, I think we have an image problem, but I also think we have a structural distribution problem.”
He mentions a problem any industry player will tell you: the limited number of screens across the continent. “Outside of Nigeria, Ethiopia, South Africa and countries in North Africa, there are very few cinemas on the continent.”
But none of that is entirely responsible for the less-than-ideal picture that is the business of African cinema today. For Markovitz, there is also the question of taste. He explains that what the average South African likes to watch today has its roots in the political history of the country.
There was a cultural boycott during Apartheid that Markovitz supported as a young man. “But what it meant is that a lot of good films never came here, so we all grew up on a diet of bad American television and you get addicted. It’s a bit like Coca-Cola: you get used to it. We need to find space in the mainstream to show good films and that needs investment and support.”
Still, there’s hope, he claims, as private equity and banks get into the business. “There’s more potential for infrastructural development and audience building than there has been.”
I mention that his Mubi for Africa idea is one I had thought of only a few hours before our conversation because the existing Mubi had just shown me an online ad for screenings of Mati Diop’s Golden Bear winner, Dahomey. Perhaps the gods of the algorithm were saying that a Mubi for Africa really is a great idea.
The problem, though, is that no one knows for sure if there is a market for African cinema at such a scale. A bank or a venture capital firm choosing to throw capital at the idea would require a return on investment at some point. Can Markovitz say boldly that the gap he has correctly identified has a market embedded therein?
“If I knew the answer to that my life would be easier,” he says, laughing. “Look, I think that it’s an unproven market, an untested market. Building that platform would be precedent-setting, so there’s an element of real risk in that you can’t say, ‘The last one did this and the last one did that.’”
Who pays for African films
But the man is an optimist, so he adds that the success of such a business will depend on what movies end up on the platform. “We all know that the films we see in Berlin or Cannes or Sundance are often speaking more to the international audience than the local audience. And most of those films are funded by international sources. So, you can see what’s going on, right?
“They’re paying for the films and often the films that are getting selected are what Europe wants to see of Africa, not necessarily what Africa wants to see of itself or wants to make about itself. So, I think the problem is also in the whole funding system. This dependency on international funding for films often dictates the kind of films we make.
“And they’re great films, they need to be made, and I make some of those films. But I think that when we see more influx of African money into cinema and television, there’ll be more chance of building local audiences and more opportunity for African producers and directors to make films for local audiences.”
But new monied entrants have to be smart, he says. “The distribution question is an ongoing question and a huge one, and I think there’s a real danger with all this new equity funding going around. As producers, we may just grab the money and make the films. But we have to solve the distribution problem at the same time. Otherwise, in ten years, all of these investors are going to go, ‘What happened to our money?’”
Back to Mubi, which he says gets EU subsidies and he cheerily describes as a Silicon Valley entity with a “European cool image”. It’s a model for what Africa should build. “There has to be a combination of softer money and equity money in building this distribution infrastructure, which can help build audiences and unlock finance and revenue for African films.”
When I remind him that he hasn’t really answered the question of whether there’s a market, he says pointedly that there is, only that nobody has tested it. “It will work. It is just a matter of time and tenacity and financing.”
Since we are spitballing in a sense, I ask if making anthologies of shorts from directors all over the continent is one way of building audiences across the continent. Markovitz has the requisite experience. In 2023, Netflix released the African Folktales Reimagined project, a collection of six short films made by directors from around Africa. Markovitz produced it. 10 years before, he worked in the same capacity on African Metropolis, a GT Bank-sponsored project also with directors from different countries.
Anthologies of the sort are useful, Markovitz agrees, just not in direct short-term commercial terms. He gives an example. In 2010, Big World released Latitude, a project sponsored by the Goethe Institut. It featured short films from newcomer filmmakers around the continent. One of those filmmakers was a young lady from Kenya named Wanuri Kahiu. Eight years later, Kahiu’s breakout film, Rafiki, premiered in Cannes, the first Kenyan film to do so.
That near-decade trajectory suggests that the value in anthologies of short films is in the long game. But Markovitz says there’s a way of making anthologies financially viable directly: “Make the films with more experienced filmmakers”. The model is Paris, je t’aime, the 2006 anthology of shorts stacked with some of the most accomplished filmmakers from the Americas and Europe, including the Coen brothers, Walter Salles, Isabel Coixet, and Alexander Payne.
To pull off something of that nature in Africa would “require bigger budgets” but that’s the only way to make it financially viable. It appears he doesn’t want to say too much too early, but the man looks like he has a plan.
What’s next for Big World
With the first three decades of Big World gone, Big World is re-strategising. It will be doing “less art house films and more genre films, films that have more commercial potential”. Times have changed. “Since COVID, it’s become much more difficult to build an economy out of only doing art house films,” he says.
But some things will remain. The company is working with filmmakers it has worked with in the past. A list comes tumbling out: Kahiu, Uganda’s Loukman Ali, Sudan’s Hajooj Kuka, Kenya’s Jim Chuchu. The idea is to make “more of a global impact with our films”.
Global impact. It’s something that African filmmaking hasn’t quite managed. The somewhat egalitarian nature of streaming should make it easier for African filmmaking to show up internationally outside of the continent. But there is no Squid Game from Africa. What needs to change?
He pauses for a moment and then says, “If anyone says they have the answer to that, they lie.” He chuckles. But if the Steven Markovitz doesn’t have the answer, who does? He laughs and offers an answer.
“The first thing is we need to secure more funding to develop our scripts a lot more. Our scripts are generally underdeveloped. We haven’t had the resources and sometimes expertise to really develop our scripts to an optimum level. Often films are going to production because we need to earn money not because the script is at its best.”
“I think, from the South African point of view, we need to also believe in ourselves more,” he adds. “When you believe in yourself more, you are open to taking more risks and when you take more risks, that’s often when you have breakthroughs. Without enough self-belief, one tends to be quite derivative in the kinds of films you make. ’Ah, I saw that American film; wouldn’t be cool to be a Nigerian version of that?’ No, it wouldn’t be cool.”
He says that there’s a need for support because often films are “rushed in the way they’re shot. There’s never enough money…and there are compromises and often directors have to do corporate work or NGO work.” But even with the right funding, the African filmmaker who will do a project that is loved in Africa and outside of it has to have something extra; he calls it “the main ingredient, something you can’t put your finger on”. The ideal filmmaker he’s talking about will have to tap into “something about the zeitgeist”.
“The more authentic it is, the more real it is. But it needs [to be] well-written, well-made, and [have] these universal themes”.
As an example of how much the budget is important, he offers up 2005’s Tsotsi, the Oscar-winning South African film. “I can’t remember the budget, but I think it was around $3m and that was 20 years ago,” he says. “The average film made on our continent is around half a million to a million dollars.” The message is clear: It will be difficult for African films to make a global impact on the prevailing budget.
While ruminating on the subject, Markovitz mentions 2010’s Viva Riva, Djo Munga’s classic Congolese thriller. “There was something in there,” he says. I nod my agreement. It’s indeed a great film.
“I’ll never forget the Australian distributor calling it a beer and pizza movie,” he continues. “It is a film you watch sitting with your friends and drinking beer. It’s a very accessible film. And when it showed at SXSW, all the fan boys went crazy. So, it did tap into a different audience.”
He notes that the film had limited production values, and that at a bigger scale, Viva Riva, which was made for under $2m, is the kind of African film that can have a breakthrough internationally today.
But Munga, the brilliant man behind the film, seems to have disappeared entirely from the film business. Where is he? He’s still writing, Markovitz tells me laconically.
The economics of Big World Cinema
Throughout our conversation, Markovitz has mentioned the economy of African filmmaking—which is nothing unusual for a producer. We just haven’t spoken about the economics of Big World itself. What, for instance, is the film that has done the best business in the firm’s 30 years?
“It depends,” he begins. “Is it how many times the budget the film made or how much over the budget it made? Or is it about the biggest amount of money?”
Both, I tell him. Profit and raw revenue. He thinks for a bit and then names a Jim Chuchu project.
“A very small film called Stories of our Lives, five short films pieced together. The total budget was $15,000. This is the 10th year of that film [We are speaking at the end of 2004] and it is still getting booked for festivals, other screenings, and VODs every single year, earning money.
“It’s done really, really well. So, I think it’s worth mentioning that it’s not just about how much money; it’s about how much money in relation to the budget.”
Othe films that have done quite well are Viva Riva, Rafiki, and High Fantasy, which was shot on an iPhone 7. Is he willing to supply a range of figures for these films? He laughs and demurs.
With that our time is up. But he wants to volunteer a lesson he has learned in the 30 years he has steered Big World.
“You can never rest on your laurels,” he says. “If you have a success and start thinking, ‘I’ve worked it out’, you are going to get a smack; you are going to get a wake-up call. You always have to be curious, you have to stay humble. The minute you start assuming you’ve got it, you are going to fall short. That has been my big lesson.”
