African filmmakers made history at this month’s Sundance Film Festival (January 23 to February 2). For the first time, two documentaries about East Africa made by East African filmmakers premiered at its prestigious World Cinema Documentary competition. This watershed moment isn’t just about artistic recognition — it represents a crucial shift in who gets to shape Africa’s narrative on the global stage.

The selected films, How to Build a Library from Kenya and Khartoum from Sudan, emerge from a region historically starved of filmmaking infrastructure. While West Africa benefited from French colonial investment in cinema and access to financing schemes, East Africa’s former colonial powers, Britain and Germany, left no such legacy. After independence, pressing development needs further sidelined investment in the arts.

Changing the narrative about Africa

As an Emmy-nominated producer who writes and gives TED talks about the impact of the creative industries on Africa’s economic future, I know that too often, the stories that circulate about places like Kenya and Sudan depict them in a biased light.

As the report “Africa in the Media” from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg school shows, television viewers are more than twice as likely to see negative depictions of Africa than positive ones and seven times more likely to see references to Europe on TV than any mention of Africa. Similarly, a recent report by the narrative change advocacy organization Africa No Filter demonstrated that skewed reporting on the continent increases African countries’ perceived risk by investors, leading to higher borrowing costs that deprive Africa of $4.2 billion annually in foreign direct investment.

This is even as the International Monetary Fund projects that, by 2050, more than 25% of the world’s population will be African, and by the end of the century, 40% will be. Anyone not thinking about Africa as part of the future will be left behind.

Clichéd stories about Africa hurt us all by impoverishing our collective imagination and obscuring the many opportunities inherent in Africa becoming the largest source of global workforce growth. But when African filmmakers tell their own stories, the perspective shifts. Audiences gain access to visions of Africa that are rooted in solutions instead of just the problems.

When a film like How to Build a Library circulates widely, it begins to repair the harm done by hackneyed portrayals of Africa like overreporting on election violence and instead highlights local solutions that are in full bloom.

The film follows two Kenyan women, Shiro and Wachuku, as they rebuild McMillan Memorial library, a colonial library that was not designed with Kenyans in mind. Shiro and Wachuku have to navigate local politics as they work to raise millions of dollars to rebuild the library which is owned by the government but has been left neglected and in disrepair. Unexpected obstacles, including skeptical librarian staff who view the women as outsiders, test their resolve and threaten to dash their dreams — though their cheery disposition and charisma on camera make it difficult to believe there is anything these women can’t do.

The wife-and-husband filmmaking team of Maia Lekow and Christopher King captures the highs and lows of the journey, weaving archival materials of Kenya’s colonial past (stored in the library’s archives) with present-day portraits that reveal there is still a great deal of work remaining.

In a particularly poignant moment, the official charged with approving the extended lease that would allow Shiro and Wachuku to begin construction finds an old photo of his deceased mother in the archives of the library. Suddenly, it becomes clear that restoring the library is as personal as it is public, and that honoring the stories that may be lost to history — if not for intrepid individuals like Shiro and Wachuka — is an urgent task.

Similarly, Khartoum goes beyond the headlines about Sudan’s civil war. It reveals the resilience of ordinary citizens fleeing the conflict, who find creative ways to respond amid what the UN calls the world’s worst displacement crisis. Forced to leave Sudan after the war broke out, five citizens of Khartoum reenact their stories of survival and freedom. Among them are a civil servant, a tea lady, a resistance committee volunteer, and two young bottle collectors. Through their personal narratives, they reflect on their journey from dreams to revolution to civil war and, ultimately, to exile.  

Told through green-screen, animated dreamscapes and an ethereal musical score, this inventive documentary takes audiences on an emotional journey. It weaves together vivid sequences that capture what it felt like to live in Khartoum before the conflict — and what it feels like to live in exile now.

The Sudanese filmmakers Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, Ibrahim Snoopy and Timeea Ahmed, along with British director Phil Cox, create a space for their subjects to process traumatic memories with extraordinary love and care.

The film’s storytelling stands in stark contrast to news reports on Sudan. Its tone, depth and humanity highlight cinema’s power to transform consciousness. This is as far from “trauma porn” as a film can get.

Instead, it is cathartic. It takes audiences on a journey that delicately weaves together memory, story, and love. It visualizes the human bonds that remain intact, even in the face of tragic violence. Ultimately, it serves as a reminder that to remember may be the most human act of all.

African filmmakers achieve independence

The selection of these films at Sundance is particularly striking, given the neo-colonial dynamics that often constrain African filmmaking. Most productions on the continent still rely heavily on European co-production funding. This funding often comes with strings attached, subtly reshaping stories to fit Western expectations of victims in need of saving.

This form of cultural gatekeeping can reinforce stereotypes rather than challenge them. A recent report on inclusive production by the European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs Association highlights the changes needed to address these asymmetries. Key recommendations include acknowledging the creative team’s connection to or distance from the community being portrayed and ensuring that creative control remains with the original producers, even when financing comes from external sources.

Both of these films succeed in meeting those standards. Their narrative positioning and foundation are tied to local support, particularly from the Nairobi-based Docubox East African Film Fund. Docubox, a nonprofit whose funders include the Ford Foundation and the Global Community and Engagement Resilience Fund, focuses on stories that reflect a diversity of social, cultural, and political realities while also creating a thriving community for independent African filmmakers. The organization’s “no strings attached” funding allows filmmakers to tell stories that escape the usual tropes other financing schemes may favor.

Supporting independent African filmmakers leads to transformative results, with an impact that extends beyond cinema. When African storytellers control their own narratives, they help repair the psychological damage caused by decades of reductive storytelling. Their films act as a form of cultural medicine, addressing what Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie famously called “the danger of a single story.”

Of course, two films alone cannot fix the widespread inequities in representation. But their success at Sundance signals something profound—the emergence of a more equitable global storytelling ecosystem. This shift is largely driven by local arts organizations that have been quietly doing the work for years.

It suggests that African perspectives no longer need to be filtered through a Western lens to reach international audiences. In a world where perceptions shape reality, these films offer a vision of Africa authored by Africans themselves. They serve as a reminder that the power to tell one’s own story is not a luxury — it is a necessity for building a more just global future.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.