John Boye­ga part­ners with Net­flix to bol­ster Africa’s film industry

In 2017, Net­flix released a film called Impe­r­i­al Dreams, a minor-league indie that had played at Sun­dance back in 2014 with­out get­ting picked up for dis­tri­b­u­tion. It holds the dis­tinc­tion of being John Boye­ga​’s final film before the Star Wars movies rock­et­ed him to the A‑list, and so even as his for­tunes con­tin­ued to rise in the main­stream at cine­plex­es, that job kept him endeared to Net­flix.

It should come as no great sur­prise, then, to learn that the Big Red N has teamed with Boye­ga on a new ini­tia­tive to devel­op orig­i­nal films in and about Africa. An item at Vari­ety details plans for a part­ner­ship between Net­flix and Boyega’s pro­duc­tion house Upper­Room, which will bring more titles not in the Eng­lish lan­guage to the high-pow­er stream­ing service.

Though born and raised in Britain, Boye­ga has cul­ti­vat­ed a con­nec­tion to his roots in Nige­ria, and hopes to bring projects based on dis­tinct­ly African ​“sto­ries, cast, char­ac­ters, crew, lit­er­ary prop­er­ties, mythol­o­gy, screen­plays and/​or oth­er ele­ments” to a glob­al audi­ence. He’s got the pro­duc­ing expe­ri­ence to fol­low through on this, too, hav­ing stepped up to a more super­vi­so­ry role first on Pacif­ic Rim: Upris­ing.

This rep­re­sents the lat­est chap­ter of Netflix’s ongo­ing effort to get a stake in the African econ­o­my. After some scuf­fles over tax leg­is­la­tion with the Zam­bian gov­ern­ment last year, Net­flix has moved on to Nige­ria and South Africa, hav­ing just debuted their first African orig­i­nal series Queen Sono at the end of Feb­ru­ary. As sub­scrip­tions start to ebb in West­ern mar­kets, Net­flix has been vocal about boost­ing their num­bers in less sat­u­rat­ed regions — Africa could hold the company’s future.

If noth­ing else, it will diver­si­fy the slate of new con­tent get­ting cart­ed out on a week­ly basis, pro­vid­ing fine addi­tions to the extant African titles The Boy Who Har­nessed the Wind and, er, Hol­i­day in the Wild. (With­out ques­tion one of the whitest movies about Africa ever made.)