The pan-African story of South African cinema

When I ask Nhlanhla Ndaba what South African cinema owes to the rest of the continent, he doesn't reach for a recent example. He goes back to exile.

Ndaba has spent more than two decades in the South African film industry, almost always from behind the scenes rather than in front of them.

He started as a production runner in 2003, working his way up through festival management at Out in Africa, Encounters and the Tri Continental Film Festival.

Along the way he's produced shows for the SABC and eTV, worked as an impact assistant producer on the Emmy-winning Miners Shot Down, sat as a juror at the Berlinale International Film Festival and spent two years on Netflix's local production slate.

He returned to the Joburg Film Festival in 2022 as its curator, a role he had been building towards since serving as the festival's programme manager in 2018 and 2019.

"South African cinema's ties with the rest of the continent have been a strong, yet often overlooked, force for renewal," he tells me. Long before 1994, the country's liberation struggle "leaned heavily on support from other African nations—not just politically but culturally too".

Filmmakers pushed into exile carried the culture with them. Ndaba points to Lionel Ngakane, the South African actor and director who helped found Fepaci, the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers, working alongside figures like Ousmane Sembène.

The relationships tied South African storytelling to the continent's Third Cinema movement, the anti-colonial filmmaking tradition that stretched from Senegal to Algeria. It means the version of South African cinema that eventually broke through in the late 1980s and after 1994 was never starting from nothing.

"Thanks to a strong dose of pan-African political vibes, the groundwork had been laid for a kind of cinema that could call out injustice while proudly holding a dignified black perspective," Ndaba says.

Even work made clandestinely under apartheid, like the 1974 documentary Last Grave at Dimbaza, moved through those same pan-African networks, absorbing lessons from Francophone African film.

Ndaba is careful not to frame this as simple opportunism. "This wasn't just about boosting technical skills," he says. "It stretched the creative horizons of South Africa's film industry."

A cinematographer used to the light of Soweto or the Karoo suddenly had to learn the textures of West and Central Africa. South African actors had to shed their own physical and vocal habits to inhabit Ugandan, Rwandan or Sierra Leonean characters.

"This shift broadened South African cinema's emotional reach way beyond its own borders," he says.

The most significant transformation, Ndaba says, didn't come through co-productions. It came through migration.

After 1994, Johannesburg absorbed filmmakers, writers and actors from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia. They didn't arrive as visitors telling stories about elsewhere but as residents telling stories from inside South African life.

Akin Omotoso is his central example: born in Nigeria, raised partly in South Africa, a director whose films "refuse to treat South Africa as if it's some sealed off island".

His 2011 film, Man on Ground, confronts xenophobic violence but does it through the human story of two Nigerian brothers in Johannesburg. Vaya (2016), which he produced and co-wrote, braids together three migrants' journeys into the city, scripted by a team of writers from across the continent.

"These aren't just South African films looking at 'the other'," Ndaba says. "Instead, they're pan-African stories born right inside South Africa's reality, mixing different mother tongues and storytelling styles."

He thinks it has changed the tone of South African film, which he says has long carried an earnestness rooted in its anti-apartheid and struggle-cinema origins, which tend to be heavy on message and sometimes light on pleasure. West African creative energy, he suggests, has "gently and sometimes with a bit of humour, shifted that balance".

It has shown up on screen, too, in performers who complicated what a South African face or voice was supposed to sound like: Zimbabwean actors Tongayi Chirisa and Sibongile Mlambo, Nigerian-born Hakeem Kae-Kazim and performers from the Congo, for example.

Once a Nigerian actor could plausibly play a South African character, the reverse casting itself had to abandon the old assumption that ethnicity locks a person into a fixed national role.

"This shift quietly tears down that apartheid-era mindset that tried to box people in, based on ethnic or national roots," Ndaba says.

Add together the exile-era political networks, the years as a stand-in shooting location, the post-1994 wave of migrant filmmakers and the co-productions and Ndaba's argument is that none of it was incidental to South African cinema's development. It was the mechanism of it.

"This web of pan-African creative partnerships has kept South African cinema from being just a narrow national story stuck on apartheid," he says. "Instead, it's become part of a wider continental network."

The result, in his telling, is an industry with a broader emotional register and the confidence to tell stories that are local and continental "at the same time".

"Honestly," he says, "our cinema is richer because our borders turned out to be pretty open."

Ndaba doesn't have to reach far for proof this isn't just history. He points to two films at this year's festival that grew directly out of continental connections South Africa's infrastructure makes possible.

Sri Lankan director Yaseen J Khan met South African producer Kopedi Aphane at a previous edition of the festival. Together they made Robots (2026), a film about people waiting at traffic lights, which premiered this year at the very festival where its makers first found each other.

Elsewhere on the programme was The Woman Who Poked The Leopard, directed by Ugandan filmmaker Patience Nitumwesiga and produced by South African filmmaker Rosie Motene. The film confronts Yoweri Museveni's government and was made possible by a Ugandan director working with South African editing and production expertise.

For Ndaba, the collaborations work because the two industries bring different strengths to the table.

"South African crews often come with solid technical know-how with fancy equipment," he says, while creatives from Nollywood bring "unbeatable skills in quick, low-budget, high-output storytelling that really clicks with audiences". Put those together and "you get South African precision mixed with West African commercial savvy".

It's the same exchange that shaped the industry decades ago, still running, just with different names attached.

Long before any of the recent politics, he points out, Nguni migrations, itinerant miners and apartheid-era exiles in Dar es Salaam and Dakar had stitched South African identity together with threads from across the continent.

A film industry built partly by exiles, sustained by migrants and shaped by co-production is consistent with the older, longer story.

"If the programme ignored those connections, it'd be like saying our story starts and ends at our borders, which just isn't true."

It's why, when he talks about the Joburg Film Festival's continental programming, he doesn't describe it as charity or vague solidarity toward the rest of Africa. He describes it as continuity, as the same exchange that built the industry, still running.

"We're crafting a vision of what this country could be," he says, "one that's confident enough to own its African identity without hesitation." Not a stand-in for someone else's stories anymore. A place that was never, in fact, standing alone.