The “Les Téranga festival” had to stream as its theme during its 2023 edition, organized from April 27th to 29th in Dakar.
On April 29th, 2023, the film L’Esclave by Moroccan director Abdelilah El Jouahri won the Grand Prize (feature film selection) at the Les Téranga festival, organized in Dakar.
This year, the theme chosen for this meeting for African cinema was streaming. Video-on-demand (VOD) platforms are now part of the landscape, heavyweights like Netflix or Amazon, but also newcomers like Wido, from the Orange group, oriented towards African content.
“In streaming, if you have the confidence of the platform, you shoot in a year”
Souleymane Kébé has been producing films for more than ten years for dark rooms. Streaming platforms have been approaching him for a few months. At the head of two production companies, he still dreams of seeing his films on the big screen with previews and red carpets. But he also sees more flexibility in streaming: “You save more time. When you conventionally make a film, the search for financing, takes you three years, four years, two years, and five years even to raise the financing and to shoot the film. In streaming, if you have the confidence of the platform, they take out the money, you do it, and you shoot in a year. »
The famous filmmaker Moussa Sène Absa is also aware of new opportunities with the development of streaming. His films, such as Tableau Ferraille or Madame Brouette are not yet available on the internet. But he wants that to change: “I would have liked to have my films shown in streaming because it gives accessibility to the content, that people know my work, which is not very well known. In any case, in the French-speaking world, it is not very well known. Anglophones know my work better than Francophones. That’s the whole contradiction. »
Moussa Sène Absa is already thinking about post-streaming, imagining the possibilities offered by augmented reality and artificial intelligence.