EXCLUSIVE: In a sign of the growing momentum around African cinema, the inaugural African Film Investor Roundtable (IFIR) gathered top film investors and financiers involved in the continent’s creative industries in Cape Town this week, alongside a host of regional producers and international experts.

Running July 21 to 23, the meeting was spearheaded by Steven Markovitz, the founding CEO of Big World Cinema, the Cape Town-based company behind a string of African festival hits including Omen, Tug of War and Rafiki, and the African creative industries-focused HEVA Fund.

Markovitz, who is also Executive Director of the African Producers Accelerator (APA), co-chaired the meeting with HEVA Fund Managing Partner Wakiuru Njuguna.

“It feels like a historic moment in African cinema with increased global recognition of the growing talent on the continent and increased availability of African finance for African film, the roundtable was a unique opportunity to bring these forces together and the results were beyond,” he said as the meeting wrapped.

Njuguna, whose Nairobi-based HEVA Fund has mobilized more than  $40 million and invested in more than 500 creative businesses across East Africa to date, added: “The driving force behind the roundtable was to bring together investors who already recognise African film as an investable asset class and create a platform for collaboration across the continuum of capital.”

He was among a number of key rising African film funders who made the trip to Cape Town including Osahon Akpata, CEO of CANEX Creations Inc., the intellectual property investment company of Afreximbank’s Fund for Export Development in Africa (FEDA), which recently invested in Nigerian produced NEON-acquired drama Clarissa by fraternal directorial duo Arie and Chuko Esiri.

Adekunle Adebiyi, Executive Director, Investments at Lagos-based MBO Capital Management Limited, which has invested more than $9 million in the African film industry, supporting the production of more than 42 film and TV productions from Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda and South Africa to date, was also in attendance.  

Participants also included representatives of the Ford Foundation, the Bertha Foundation, the Mastercard Foundation, South Africa’s Industrial Development Corporation and National Film and Video Foundation, and Business and Arts South Africa, as individual investors including Tony Tabatznik and Wale Gbadamosi-Oyekanmi alongside experts Caroline von Kühn, Executive Director of Oxbelly, and Erica Motley Dupuis, Executive Producer at Impact X Capital.

The meeting also featured a program of expert talks from international film professionals.

Phil Hunt, Co-founder and CEO of Head Gear Films and Bankside Films, led a session on de-risking the film value chain from development to distribution; Nadim Cheikhrouha, the Oscar-nominated producer of Four Daughters and The Voice of Hind Rajab walked investors through case studies from budget to finance plan to waterfall; and lawyer Sandra Oyewole, Partner and Head of the Intellectual Property and Technology Practice at DLA Piper Africa Nigeria presented an overview of IP finance in Africa.

AFIR grew out of the African Producers Accelerator, established by Big World Cinema in 2025 with the support of the Bertha Foundation, to help mid-career African producers strengthen their businesses and prepare investment-ready projects. In 2026, APA received over 260 applications from 31 African countries; six producers from the new cohort pitched their projects to investors during the meeting, alongside five producers from last year’s cohort.

All eleven producers had come through APA’s three-month programme covering business strategy, financing structures and investor readiness.

They included Annemarie Du Plessis, producer of a 2026 Rotterdam Tiger winner Variations on a Theme; Khalid Awad, co-producer of the Cannes award winner Goodbye, Julia; Josh Olaoluwa, who produced film One Woman, One Bra, which premiered at Venice and went on to win the audience award at Tribeca and the BFI London Film Festival’s award for best first feature, and Mimi Bartels who produced the Netflix hit Black Book and many other commercially successful films.

ANEX Creations’ Akpata praised the inaugural roundtable, saying an “impressive group of people” had been put together for the meeting.

“I see very investable projects… and I’m sure that they will get funding either from Canex Creations Inc. or some of the other investors who were in the room,” he added.

The next AFIR meeting will take place in Lagos in November at the 2026 edition of CANEX WKND, a four-day networking and business opportunity event gathering creatives, investors, and industry leaders from Africa and its diaspora.

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