This is the first entry in Filmmaker’s Notebook, a new space in Anansesɛm where we step back from criticism, news and opinion to answer a more practical question: how does this industry actually work, and what does an emerging filmmaker need to understand to make better decisions about their own career. The Notebook is not about taste. It is about the mechanics behind the decisions filmmakers are already making, whether they realize it or not.
Most emerging filmmakers know they want to make films. Fewer know what kind of filmmaking career they are actually trying to build. That distinction changes almost everything: who the audience is, how the filmmaker gets paid, who they need to meet, and what their first few years should look like. There is no single route into filmmaking. A filmmaker building a festival career is playing a different game from one building an audience on YouTube, and both are playing a different game again from someone trying to get commissioned by a broadcaster, or someone building a career as a cinematographer moving from set to set. This piece maps six of those games as they actually exist in West Africa right now, using real careers rather than theory, so a filmmaker reading it can look at the map and recognize which road they are already on, or want to be on.
The festival and arthouse path
This is the path for filmmakers building a body of work rather than a single hit: a distinct voice, a festival track record, and eventually access to producers, sales agents, distributors, funders and international audiences who watch films as cinema rather than content. The work tends to live first in the short film and then in the feature, and the destination is the festival circuit before it is any commercial market.
The short film is where almost everyone on this path starts, and where they learn to be noticed. Ghana’s Amartei Armar is a clean example of the whole arc: his student short Arc won prizes at the University of British Columbia, his 2022 short Tsutsue became the first Ghanaian film selected in competition at Cannes, and his feature debut, Our Time Will Come, won two awards at Locarno in 2026. C.J. Obasi’s 2014 horror short Ojuju put him on the international festival map years before Mami Wata became, in 2023, the first film by a Nigerian-based filmmaker to premiere at Sundance. Chuko Esiri and his brother Arie made two shorts in New York, Goose and Besida, the latter premiering at the Berlinale in 2018, two years before their first feature, Eyimofe, played the same festival and went on to sweep Nigeria’s AMAA awards. And Akinola Davies Jr., who has described his two earlier shorts as the rehearsal for the film he actually wanted to make, turned that discipline into My Father’s Shadow, the first Nigerian film selected for Cannes’ Official Selection, which went on to win a BAFTA for Outstanding Debut.
None of these careers happened in isolation. Development labs and residencies are where a script gets tested before it goes looking for money: Realness Institute’s African Screenwriters’ Residency and its AuthenticA Series Lab, Durban FilmMart’s Talents Durban programme, and international funds such as Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund, which has spent more than three decades financing script and project development for filmmakers from regions where film industries are underfunded. A producer, often a co-producer with international financing relationships, typically attaches once a short has proven a voice is worth investing in. From there the route runs through festival strategy, more labs, financiers, and eventually a sales agent and distributor once a finished film exists to sell.
The trade-off is patience and a narrower commercial ceiling in the short term: festival films rarely make money quickly, financing can take years to assemble, and success is measured in selections and prizes rather than box office. This is not a more serious form of filmmaking than any other path in this piece. It is simply the one built around cinema as an art form, with its own gatekeepers and its own definition of having made it.
The YouTube and digital-first path
This filmmaker’s destination is not a festival or a broadcaster. It’s a platform, most often YouTube, where an audience already exists and is actively looking for stories in its own language and idiom. The work is usually shorter, produced faster and cheaper, and shaped directly by what an audience actually watches rather than by what a programmer selects.
Uche Montana built one of Nollywood’s most-watched YouTube operations through her company Montana Media, releasing feature-length films directly to a channel with more than 1.3 million subscribers; her film Monica 2 passed 10 million views within 48 hours of release. Ruth Kadiri went further still: she launched RuthKadiri247 in 2014, when bypassing distributors for YouTube was considered a strange decision, and has since built what functions as an independent studio, commissioning scripts, financing films, hiring directors and crews and releasing directly to an audience she has accumulated herself across more than 4.6 million subscribers and two language channels. Maurice Sam took the same platform from a different starting point, as a working actor who built his own channel alongside his acting career until it became a substantial part of his business in its own right, with over half a million subscribers watching content he controls directly. In Ghana, comedy has been the fastest on-ramp: Akabenezer built one of the country’s most consistent local digital audiences through skits before diversifying, a path many Kumawood veterans have followed as their industry has migrated from DVD sales onto digital platforms.
The skills that matter here are different from festival craft. A filmmaker needs to understand retention, what makes someone keep watching past the first thirty seconds, format, since a recurring series tends to outperform a one-off, and the blunt economics of advertising revenue, where a view from a Nigerian or Ghanaian viewer is worth a fraction of a view from the diaspora audiences in the US, UK or Canada that many creators now deliberately build content to reach. Money comes from a mix of YouTube ad revenue, brand sponsorships and, increasingly, using the channel itself as proof of audience to attract other kinds of deals.
It is worth saying plainly: choosing YouTube is not a consolation prize for a filmmaker who couldn’t get into a festival. For a growing number of Ghanaian and Nigerian filmmakers, the platform itself is the business model, and the audience it delivers, often larger and more immediate than anything a festival or broadcaster offers, is the point.
The cinema-first path
This is filmmaking built around a mass audience and a commercial return: recognizable actors, popular genres, and stories timed to what a paying audience wants to see right now. The traditional home for this work has been the cinema, and increasingly, the cinema is only the first stop.
The pattern that now defines this pathway is cinema first, streaming second. A film opens in cinemas across West Africa to build box office numbers, reviews and cultural conversation, and only afterward gets licensed to a platform such as Netflix or Amazon Prime Video for a second, longer life. Funke Akindele has built her career on staying disciplined about that order: while much of the industry leaned into direct-to-streamer deals after the pandemic, she kept releasing her films in cinemas first, and her December releases have become an annual box office event. Behind the Scenes became the highest-grossing Nollywood film ever made, earning more than ₦2.7 billion across West African cinemas, before it was later licensed to stream on Amazon Prime Video. The theatrical run is what builds the numbers and the cultural moment; the streaming deal that comes after is what extends the film’s life and its earnings.
Behind these box office careers sits a layer of production and distribution companies built specifically for this market: FilmOne Group, which distributes and produces across Nigeria and West Africa; EbonyLife, built by Mo Abudu around commercial genre films and international partnerships including with Netflix; and Golden Effects Pictures, Kunle Afolayan’s company, which has moved between commercial and prestige projects while keeping an audience-first sensibility. Ghana’s own cinema-first example predates the current Nollywood boom: Shirley Frimpong-Manso’s The Perfect Picture, released in 2009 through her company Sparrow Productions, was built and marketed as a cinema event and proved durable enough to earn a sequel a decade later, The Perfect Picture: Ten Years Later. The commercial current also runs across the Ghana-Nigeria border in both directions. Films such as Potato Potahto, directed by Frimpong-Manso with Nigerian producing partners, and House of Gold, a Ghana-Nigeria co-production, show a working cross-border commercial market that Ghanaian filmmakers can plug into directly rather than treating Nollywood only as a neighbour to admire.
Success here depends on reading an audience accurately: casting, genre, pacing, marketing and release timing all matter as much as the script. The trade-off is that the work is judged first by how many people paid to see it, and only second, if at all, by festival or critical validation. That is not a weakness. It is simply a different scoreboard.
The commissioned and broadcaster path
This filmmaker’s client, in effect, is a broadcaster or platform that commissions work, rather than an audience that pays per ticket or subscribes to a filmmaker’s own channel. In West Africa, that has meant MultiChoice above almost anyone else, through Africa Magic and, since 2021, its dedicated Ghanaian channel, Akwaaba Magic, on DStv and GOtv.
Producers submit proposals through MultiChoice’s own content portal, where projects are assessed against strategy, originality and production value before entering a structured commissioning process that comes with editorial guidance and budget support. Ghanaian filmmakers including Shirley Frimpong-Manso, Peter Sedufia, Julia Apea, Ivan Quashigah and Kwabena Gyansah have built careers substantially on this pipeline, working with budgets that allow for a level of production value a filmmaker self-financing a project rarely can. Gyansah, whose Ananse Entertainment produces and directs shows such as High Currency for Akwaaba Magic, has credited the channel’s backing with sparking what he calls a complete transformation of Ghana’s creative landscape, well beyond the single project any one commission pays for. A filmmaker typically moves from one commission to a bigger one by delivering on the first, not through a single, fixed ladder; a feature that gets noticed can lead to a series order, or a strong producing relationship on one show can lead directly to another.
Rights and ownership are not a single, fixed arrangement across this pathway. They are negotiated per deal, and the terms depend on who financed the production, who owns the underlying idea, and what the broadcaster needs to justify its commission. Some commissions leave the production company holding meaningful rights; others are structured as full buyouts. A filmmaker entering this pathway should treat that as a negotiation to have, not an assumption to make.
The trade-off with any commissioning relationship is that the filmmaker is building a career on top of someone else’s business decisions, and that risk is not hypothetical. Showmax, which had become a real commissioning engine for African originals in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, was shut down entirely by MultiChoice’s parent company, Canal+, in April 2026 after years of losses, its content migrated to DStv Stream. A broadcaster relationship can build a career quickly. It can also disappear as a line item in someone else’s cost-cutting decision, which is exactly why filmmakers on this path are usually well served by keeping a second project moving on their own terms.
The vertical and short-form path
Vertical drama asks a specific question: what changes when the phone screen itself becomes part of the storytelling format. Episodes run one to three minutes, shot vertically, and released in rapid succession, built for a viewer deciding whether to keep watching within the first few seconds, on a screen they are already holding.
Globally, this is already a billion-dollar industry, dominated by platforms such as ReelShort and DramaBox that emerged out of China and the United States. In Africa, it barely exists yet, which is precisely the opportunity: CliffBox launched this year as, by its own claim, the continent’s first dedicated vertical short-drama app, and a South African collective called the Microdrama Production Team unveiled AfriVerts, a slate of five original sixty-episode microdrama series aimed at the global vertical market rather than a local one. A new Digital Creator Africa Academy has begun training filmmakers specifically in the format, treating it as a distinct craft rather than a smaller version of filmmaking.
For many young filmmakers, the on-ramp into this pathway is the same skit and short-form comedy culture that feeds Ghana and Nigeria’s biggest social media accounts, but the destination is different. A TikTok skit is built to be watched once and shared; a vertical drama is built to be binged across dozens of short episodes, with cliffhangers engineered into every ending, and its business model depends on paid unlocks and subscriptions rather than ad revenue on a single video.
The trade-off is that almost none of this infrastructure exists locally yet: financing, distribution and even training are new enough that anyone entering now is helping build the pathway rather than following an established one. That is a real risk, and, for a filmmaker willing to move early, a real opening.
The path that runs underneath the other five
The five pathways above are defined by where the work goes. This one is defined by what a filmmaker actually does on set, and it runs underneath all of them: a cinematographer can shoot a festival feature, a commercial cinema release and a broadcaster-commissioned series in the same year without ever directing a project of their own. Not every filmmaker wants to be a director or producer. Some are building a career as a cinematographer, production designer, editor, sound designer, costume designer, assistant director, line producer or production manager, moving from project to project rather than owning any one of them.
Ghana’s Prince Kojo-Hilton built exactly that kind of career, working as an art director on international productions including Netflix’s Sense8 and Beasts of No Nation, alongside his work at home. In Nigeria, cinematographers Barnabas Emordi, Nora Awolowo and Idowu Adedapo have built visible careers shooting Netflix-commissioned Nollywood titles including Blood Sisters and Lisabi: The Uprising, work that sits inside the commercial and commissioned pathways described above even though the cinematographers themselves are following a career logic distinct from either.
This pathway runs on relationships more than any other. International and larger local productions rarely advertise crew positions publicly; a department head hires people they already know and trust, which is why building a reputation with the right heads of department, on smaller projects first, matters more early on than any single credit. In markets such as South Africa, dedicated crew agencies have emerged to formalize that matching process; in Ghana and Nigeria, it still runs mostly on relationships and word of mouth. What makes someone employable at an international level is a visible, specific body of work rather than a generalist résumé: a cinematographer known for a particular kind of lighting, a production designer known for a particular kind of world-building.
Progression here looks like moving to bigger productions and better-known collaborators rather than moving up a title. A sustainable crew career is built slowly, project by project, and the biggest risk is invisibility: doing excellent work that nobody outside the production ever hears about. Deliberately building a portfolio and a reputation, not just a filmography, is the actual job.
Where is your film going?
Before asking how to make a film, it is worth asking where that film is supposed to go. The answer changes almost everything: who the audience is, how the filmmaker gets paid, who needs to be met, and what the first few years of a career should actually look like. A filmmaker chasing festivals needs shorts, labs, producers and patience. A filmmaker building a YouTube audience needs to understand platform behaviour and consistency more than festival strategy. A filmmaker angling for a broadcaster commission needs to understand pitching, budgets and the fine print of a rights agreement. A filmmaker building a crew career needs a portfolio and the right relationships more than a single big break.
None of these pathways are prisons, and none of the filmmakers named in this piece are limited to only the one they are best known for. A filmmaker can start on YouTube and move toward festivals. A filmmaker can shoot commercials while developing an independent feature. A filmmaker can build a broadcaster relationship while a personal project develops slowly on the side. Someone who starts as crew can become a director. The map is not a cage. It is simply the thing an emerging filmmaker needs before they can decide, honestly, which road they are already on, and which one they actually want.