Beyond Production: How the Creative Producer Indaba Forges the Next Generation of African & Indian Ocean Media Leaders

Conceived by the Cape Town-based Realness Institute—a key architect of Africa’s contemporary film development landscape—CPI is a masterclass in coalition-building. Its partnerships with European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs (EAVE), the Indian Ocean International Film Festival (FIFOI), and Maison du Cinéma et des Jeux Vidéo, backed financially by Region Réunion, signal a model of transnational cooperation. This structure moves beyond traditional aid-based support to create a shared platform for skill transfer, market access, and co-production potential.

The programme’s extensive backing from a consortium of global film funds—from Brazil’s Projeto Paradiso to Canada Media Fund, Switzerland’s FOCAL, Austria’s Film Institute, and France’s CNC—is a testament to its recognized value. This isn’t just sponsorship; it’s an investment in a pipeline of professionally packaged, finance-ready projects that can attract international co-production, thereby de-risking investment into these emerging creative markets.

Participants

The cohort’s composition is itself a curriculum in modern filmmaking economics. It is strategically divided into three interconnected streams:

• Project-Based Producers: Ique Langa, Lova Nantenaina, Wame Merafhe, Yasmin Hassan Mohamed, and Shveta Naidoo are developing specific films or series. They will apply CPI’s frameworks directly to their active ventures, moving them from concept to viable business proposals.
• Professional Development Producers: Xolani Nhlapho, David Franciscus, Mahelet Gezachew, Iman Djionne, and Linda Qibaa are strengthening their overall company or producing practice. Their focus is on building sustainable business structures and leadership acumen.
• International Collaborators: Mo Harawe, Stefan Eichenberger, Soko Negash, Aswathi Naduthodi, and Talita Arruda represent key co-production territories. Their participation facilitates direct networking, demystifies cross-border financing, and seeds future collaborations, ensuring African stories reach global audiences through established channels.

Online sessions

The programme’s “future-facing” curriculum, as described by Realness Institute’s Mehret Mandefro, tackles the core disruptions in media head-on. The initial online sessions provide critical, specialized knowledge:

• Story Masterclass with Tracey-Lee Rainers: In an era of content saturation, this moves beyond basic narrative structure to explore how authentic, culturally-specific stories can achieve universal appeal and stand out in a crowded marketplace.
• International Sales Masterclass with Julien Razafindranaly: This is a rare, practical insight into the opaque world of film sales. Participants learn how sales agents evaluate projects, what makes a film “sellable” at festivals like Cannes or Berlinale, and how to position their work for global distribution.
• Finance Deep-Dive with Alicia Petrusa: This session moves beyond grant-writing to corporate strategy, cash flow management, and private equity. It addresses a major gap for creative producers: how to run a financially resilient company, not just fund a single project.

In-person workshop

The programme then transitions into intensive, in-person phases designed for application and networking:

• Johannesburg Workshop (February 2025): Here, abstract finance models become concrete pitching sessions. PR and marketing theory transforms into campaign strategies for specific projects. This is where the business plans are stress-tested.
• Réunion Workshop at FIFOI (April 2026): Leveraging the festival environment, the focus shifts to the legal intricacies of international co-productions, organizational scaling, and strategic network management. The festival setting provides a live marketplace to practice these skills.

The CPI methodology is holistic. It blends seminars for knowledge, workshops for practical application, and ongoing mentorship for tailored guidance. The goal is to produce a producer who is as confident analyzing a balance sheet as they are in the edit suite, understanding that both are essential for creative sovereignty.

Future-facing skills

The vision of CPI’s leaders underscores its transformative ambition. Mehret Mandefro highlights the imperative of resilience: “Global media systems are going through an unprecedented set of disruptions… we are focused on equipping producers with future-facing skills that can help them weather the storm and come out stronger.” This speaks to building antifragility—the capacity to thrive amid volatility.

Diana Elbaum, an award-winning producer, frames the producers’ role in larger cultural terms: “CPI celebrates producers as bold leaders, changemakers, and vital forces… whose narratives are reshaping global majority storytelling.” This reframes the producer from a facilitator to a curator of culture and an architect of the new narrative economy emerging from Africa and its diaspora.

In essence, the Creative Producer Indaba is building more than individual careers. It is constructing the professional infrastructure—the skilled leaders, the robust networks, the business-savvy creatives—necessary for a sustainable, influential, and independent audiovisual sector that can tell its own stories, on its own terms, to the world.