With expanded institutional backing and a growing pipeline connecting African producers to global capital, the APA continues to position itself as a key platform addressing one of the continent’s most persistent industry gaps.
By Joseph Jonathan
The African Producers Accelerator (APA) has unveiled the six participants selected for its 2026 edition, alongside new institutional partnerships aimed at strengthening support for African film and television producers.
The announcement was made at the ongoing Cannes Film Festival, where the initiative also confirmed collaborations with South Africa’s National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) (the country’s primary public funder for film and audiovisual development) and Creative Africa Nexus (CANEX), a pan-African programme launched by the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) to support and finance the continent’s creative industries.
Selected from 267 applications across 31 countries, the 2026 cohort includes South Africa’s Babalwa Baartman and David Franciscus; Nigeria’s Mimi Bartels and Abba T. Makama; Ghana’s Kofi Owusu-Afriyie; and Sudan’s Khalid Awad.
Launched in 2025 by Big World Cinema in partnership with the Bertha Foundation, the APA is designed to address long-standing structural barriers that mid-career African producers face. The programme combines tailored project development, business advisory support, and direct access to international investors and industry networks.
What distinguishes this year’s cohort is not simply the quality of the names but the range of what those names represent across different production contexts and cinematic traditions. Baartman produced Good Madam (Mlungu Wam), the South African horror film that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and was acquired by Shudder. Bartels, co-founder of Anakle Films, produced both Adire (2023) and Kambili: The Whole 30 Yards (2020), acquired by Netflix. Owusu-Afriyie’s (producing) debut feature, The Fisherman, premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in 2024 to strong critical attention. Makama (one third of the S16 Collective) has taken Green White Green (2016) and The Lost Okoroshi (2019) to TIFF. Awad was producer and cinematographer on Goodbye Julia, the debut feature by Mohamed Kordofani that won the Freedom Prize at Cannes in 2023. Franciscus brings a different yet no less important energy as a genre producer and festival director working at the intersection of African horror and international distribution, with Street Trash (2024) screening at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) before being acquired by Screambox. Owusu-Afriyie and Awad are both currently developing new projects supported by the Next Narrative Africa Fund.
Following a three-month development process, participants will pitch their projects at a lab in Cape Town this July — supported by the NFVF — before presenting again at CANEX WKND, a Lagos-based gathering of creatives, financiers, and policymakers focused on unlocking investment across Africa’s cultural sectors.
Alumni from the APA’s inaugural 2025 edition, including Funmbi Ogunbanwo (My Father’s Shadow), Neo Baloyi (Collision), and Jorge Cohen (Meu Semba), will also participate in the investor programme alongside the new cohort.
The 2026 edition is led by APA co-founders Tamsin Ranger and Steven Markovitz, and supported by a network of industry advisors, including Erica Motley Dupuis and Lina Chaabane.
That these producers are participating in an accelerator at all says something worth sitting with. Each has already cleared the highest barriers of entry in international film (festival) culture, yet the structural gaps in financing, investor access, and business infrastructure that the APA targets persist regardless of festival pedigree. The programme’s implicit argument is that critical recognition and institutional support are not the same thing, and that African producers who have earned the former still routinely lack access to the latter.
With expanded institutional backing and a growing pipeline connecting African producers to global capital, the APA continues to position itself as a key platform addressing one of the continent’s most persistent industry gaps: access to funding, to networks, and to sustained international visibility.