Four African episodic screenwriters will take the stage Tuesday at Series Mania to pitch the genre-flavored series they currently have in development, a crop of shows that reflect the rich and fertile landscape for African series creators looking to tap into the global TV market.
The shows are created by the first graduating class of the AuthenticA Series Lab, a training program for African episodic screenwriters launched last year by Realness Institute in partnership with Geneva-based philanthropic organization The StoryBoard Collective and Series Mania.
The four participants have spent the past six months in a collaborative environment that included both online workshops and residencies in South Africa and Switzerland, while attending masterclasses with leading industry professionals and working with a mentoring team comprised of creative producer Mehret Mandefro and story expert Selina Ukwuoma.
The four creators have each developed a bible and a pilot episode that they’ll be presenting to potential partners and financiers March 21 at 3:30pm.
“After two years of running Episodic Lab in partnership with Netflix we could not be more proud to have expanded our offering across all African countries through AuthenticA Series lab,” said Realness Institute executive director Elias Ribeiro. “We learned so much from that experience and fine-tuned the program so writers complete their six-month incubation with a pitch deck and a pilot script ready for the market.”
“I am so proud of the work these writers did in the lab because it reflects a standard of excellence that is possible when African writers get the right resources and support,” added Mandefro.
“StoryBoard is convinced of the power TV series have in shaping new cultural narratives, as well as bringing politically and geographically diverse people together,” said StoryBoard Collective founder David Rimer.“We believe that broadening the funding sources for these talented scriptwriters will increase the chances of powerful and authentic TV series to be produced.”
Nairobi-based Angela Wanjiku Wamai, whose first feature, “Shimoni” (The Pit), played at the Toronto Film Festival last year, makes her episodic debut with “Enkop” (Soil), a neo-Western series set in the dusty expanses of Kenya’s vast and volatile ranch land.
The show follows Lorna Marwa, who after her husband’s sudden suicide discovers that he left behind a massive debt he took against their family home to acquire a neighboring ranch. After living all her life in a man’s world, Lorna is now the head of the household, and must restore the family’s sinking fortunes while fighting to regain control of her life and legacy.
“Enkop” is set against the backdrop of the real-life violence that erupts in Kenya’s rugged Laikipia region every election season—violence that the show’s creator described as a legacy of decades of historical land injustice. “I can’t help but see the links between this violence and our colonial history,” said Wamai. “This Western TV series has allowed me to use the country’s ranch land to explore why the past still makes us, as Kenyans, bitter. But more importantly, to examine how we can let go of the bitterness and heal. Can anger be used for good? Can it be used to heal?”
“South African Crime Story,” from creator Chantel Clark, is likewise inspired by real-life events. The series is set in Johannesburg in 1992, as the apartheid government is steadily losing power and white paranoia is reaching a fever pitch, fueling a nationwide “Satanic Panic.” The show follows detective Charlotte Ngoyi, who while seeking justice for a teenage girl who was murdered in an apparent pagan ritual, falls deep into the dark heart of a country in limbo.
“In many ways it feels like we never really moved beyond those years, and that where apartheid burnt out in its extremities, its embers have lingered,” said Clark, whose feature film, “Wit Gesigte” (Pale Faces), currently in development, was selected for the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters Lab and the Independent Filmmaker Project’s IFP Week (now the Gotham Week Project Market).
“In seeing parallels between this moment in the early ’90s and the global shifts happening now post-pandemic, I wanted to bring a compelling South African crime drama, situated in a historical moment of uncertainty, to an international audience,” she continued. “‘South African Crime Story’ explores themes of white fear and paranoia, patriarchy and femicide, cultural identity and the complexity of human belief, through a cast of nuanced characters who inhabit opposing worlds of politics, religion and spirituality.”
London-born playwright and scriptwriter Jessica Hagan said her debut series, “Coup,” was inspired by her decision to move to Ghana in 2018, “and the complex emotions I felt within my first few years — fear, frustration and yet an overwhelming sense of belonging.”
Hagan’s award-winning play “Queen of Sheba” sold out a 10-city U.K. tour in 2019 and had a two-week run this year at New York’s Public Theater. In making the shift from the stage to the small screen with “Coup,” she wanted to explore “power, elitism and privilege, and what happens when power is placed in the hands of the unexpected.”
The show begins when six travelers en route to Ghana suddenly find themselves upgraded to first class, after what appears to be a series of coincidences that was in fact engineered by an enraged local mastermind who goes by the alias of Putsch. He recruits the six travelers in a bold and daring mission: to mount a coup d’etat against the democratically elected government of Ghana, staged just six weeks from the day they land.
At the heart of “Coup,” said Hagan, is a tension between the travelers and the criminal mastermind that reflects the “evolving relationship” between Ghanaians from the diaspora and the homeland they’re returning to — a country that’s currently in a period of feverish transition. “It’s vibrant, majestic and full of culture,” she said. “There’s room to be bold, ballsy and innovative — and that’s exactly what this show is.”
“Masquerade,” from Nigerian British screenwriter, director and photographer Tony Sebastian Ukpo, is the story of a 13-year-old Nigerian American who is suddenly transplanted to a Nigerian boarding school after the death of her father. In a country still struggling to escape the shadow of its colonial history, where local spiritual practices and folklore retain a strong grip on the imagination, she finds her grief manifesting in the form of a malevolent spirit.
As her emotional anguish grows, so too does her connection to the spirit world, offering the show’s creator fertile ground to explore in this Nigerian supernatural horror series. “People are aware of Western and Southeast Asian mythology, from vampires and werewolves to vengeful Japanese spirits, but there have been no screen stories from Nigeria that really dive into local supernatural folklore and traditions,” said Ukpo, whose feature films include the Japanese murder mystery thriller “Random 11” and the British-Nigerian romantic comedy “Mum, Dad, Meet Sam,” and who is also a mentor for the Sundance Institute’s Collab filmmaking program and a creative consultant for clients including Amazon.
“Horror is one of the best mediums in which to explore the human condition, and this is a very personal story about grief, displacement and unresolved trauma that is set in an environment that acts as a microcosm for a society often relegated to stories about Western aspirations or violence and poverty,” he added.
Pictured (L. to R.): Jessica Hagan, Angela Wanjiku Wamai, Tony Sebastian Ukpo, Chantel Clark
