Netflix is going all out to conquer the African market. In the process, envigorating the burgeoning Cape Town film industry has led to a dramatic cultural shift
Words by Cécile Bontron Images by Jéromine Derigny
In the lobby of Cape Town’s former City Club, Khosi Ngema refocuses, placing her feet firmly on the marks on the elegantly tiled floor of the large colonial building. Filming is just getting started on the third series of Blood & Water, a popular Netflix blockbuster.
Last-minute instructions are whispered in Xhosa, Sesotho, Zulu and Afrikaans by the assistants, technicians, make-up artists and actors, and then the all-African crew swings into action.
Netflix is out to conquer the African market and one of its key strategies is to offer subscribers unique and entirely local content. In Western countries, audiences for streaming services are essentially saturated. In the first quarter of 2022, Netflix experienced the first decline in its history, losing some 200,000 subscribers. Africa offers a development potential that the company hopes will reassure investors.
‘We are looking for African stories by Africans that the world wants to watch,’ says Dorothy Ghettuba, Netflix’s director of original series for Africa. ‘And we will continue to invest heavily in the best stories.’
‘Local content is attractive,’ says Richard Cooper of London-based media research firm Ampere Analysis. ‘We see it in Western Europe, in Japan, in Korea. Netflix is starting its localisation process with exclusive local production and acquisitions.’
Netflix announced that between 2016 and 2022 it invested more than US$98.6 million in South African content (a mixture of acquisitions of already created material and exclusive original productions) and promises to spend nearly US$46 million in 2022 and 2023.
At the same time, the Californian company has grown its subscription base throughout sub-Saharan Africa by offering a low-cost service aimed at mobile phone users.
‘Netflix didn’t develop a phone-led strategy early enough in India,’ says Cooper, ‘and didn’t manage to take the lead in that country. That was a wake-up call of what could have been done.’
Today, the sub-Saharan market is relatively small, but it has potential, with 495 million people owning a smartphone in 2020, a figure that’s expected to rise to 615 million by 2026. ‘This year, Netflix’s revenue in sub-Saharan Africa is estimated at US$107 million,’ Cooper adds. It’s expected to double by 2026.
Blood & Water tells the story of a high school student, Puleng, who meets the rich and popular Fikile at a party. Convinced that she’s her sister, who was kidnapped as a baby, she decides to investigate. It’s a ‘teen thriller’ in the vein of Netflix original series Riverdale and Elite, and benefits from the same high production quality.
More than 100 people are working on the set. In terms of production, Blood & Water is on par with the Hollywood films shot in recent years in South Africa. ‘We [the actors] even have our own trailer,’ says Ama Qamata, the actress who plays Puleng. ‘This is not at all common in South African productions.’
It is, however, typical of foreign productions in Cape Town. Before the Covid pandemic, more than 8,000 films, short films, commercials or documentaries were made in Cape Town each year, 70 per cent of which came from the USA, Australia, Germany or France. Mad Max Fury Road, with Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron, was filmed here, as was Close Security, with Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds, and the Showmax series Warrior, which is supposed to take place in San Francisco’s China Town during the 19th century.
It seems anything is possible in Cape Town: one can find a station on the London Underground’s Piccadilly Line in Atlantic Studios and an old rig in the middle of a huge pool in Cape Town Film Studios. But while Cape Town has become a centre for foreign productions, which tend to bring in their production crews, a local film industry has struggled to emerge.
‘Netflix is changing the face of our industry,’ says Seton Bailey, director of the SA Film Academy. ‘It’s a game changer for our young talent.’
Every year since 2008, Bailey’s association has trained about 100 young people from the townships for the film industry by placing them in apprenticeships in big foreign productions. On the set of Blood & Water, Bailey has seven apprentices in camera, sound, grip, make-up, wardrobe and continuity. There are also senior figures on the production who’ve graduated from the academy’s training school, including Lubabalo Bozo, who works as head of sound.
In the past, many foreign productions that arrived in Cape Town came complete with actors, directors, directors of photography, set, sound and lighting managers, and even make-up artists. Local technicians were confined to supporting roles and local directors and scriptwriters didn’t get a look-in.
‘When we left film school, we had no other horizons than telenovelas, advertising or the service industry for foreign films,’ recalls Nosipho Dumisa-Ngoasheng, creator and co-director of Blood & Water. ‘We wanted to tell our stories with high-quality productions.’
To take their destiny into their own hands, Dumisa-Ngoasheng and five other directors and producers started their own production company – Gambit Films. It was a struggle as, at first, the demand for local content wasn’t sufficient to sustain their ambitions.
‘The South African market is small,’ confirms Bradley Joshua, producer of Blood & Water. ‘There are only a few companies working in the country and they are often very small. Besides, what we wanted to do wasn’t being done here. We dreamt of going international, but we knew the road ahead would be long. Then Netflix offered us an incredible shortcut.’
The producer, still half disbelieving, remembers the day they received an email from a Netflix executive who had seen one of their films – Number 37, a Hitchcockian thriller – and was keen to meet to discuss projects. Joshua had tried a few years earlier to get in contact with Netflix but made little progress. ‘I didn’t get past reception,’ Joshua admits with a laugh.
‘We put everything into Number 37,’ he continues. ‘We made a lot of sacrifices to make a genre film with high production values.’
The film premiered at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, in 2018 – a first for a South African film. ‘Most South African films are dramas with a social message,’ says Joshua. ‘We wanted to show that we could do something else with the best lighting and cameras.’
Blood & Water also isn’t an overt social drama – it’s a glossy teen adventure set in an elite private high school with wealthy businessmen, houses brimming with works of art and lots of infinity pools. This is a far cry from the townships in which more than a quarter of South Africa’s population lives in small ramshackle houses.
‘When people think of Africa, they think of struggle,’ says actress Khosi Ngema. ‘The series teaches them something else about Africa. South Africans can see themselves in a positive sight.’
‘It’s a question of balance,’ adds co-director Dumisa-Ngoasheng. ‘We bring a different point of view, which was missing.’
‘I’m what we call here coloured,’ says Travis Taute, co-founder of Gambit Films and co-director of Blood & Water. ‘In South Africa, the only representations of coloured people are gangsters or prostitutes, but there are middle-class and rich coloureds.’
The series does feature a drug dealer – a complex and endearing character – but she’s played by Greteli de Swardt, a blond model whose mother tongue is Afrikaans.
The approach seems to have paid off. Following the launch of Blood & Water’s first season in May 2020, success was immediate in South Africa. It soon became a Netflix chart topper across Africa and success followed in the USA, the Caribbean, Spain, Austria, Germany, the UK and France.
‘It was completely crazy’, recalls Ama Qamata, one of the show’s stars. ‘In one day, I had 100,000 new followers on Instagram… it wouldn’t stop. I was getting messages from all over the world. It was so fast!’
Blood & Water was Qamata’s first major role – she had just started a degree at Cape Town University when she landed the part. She has since starred in a long-running South African telenovela and has just been named an Adidas ambassador. She’s now considering offers of roles in Hollywood. Gambit Films is also considering an offer to make a big-budget science fiction film in the USA. The Cape Town film industry is now setting its sights on conquering Hollywood.
