Not every significant film financing story this year involves a streaming platform’s commissioning slate or a festival’s development fund. Some of the most interesting development support in African cinema right now is coming from an unusual coalition: Africa No Filter, the pan-African narrative-change organisation; CcHUB, the Lagos-based innovation hub better known for tech than screen storytelling; and the Gates Foundation, funding it all. Together they have selected director Korede Azeez, producer Fulfilment Fuchi Nwaturuocha, and screenwriter-director Hajarat Alli to develop Daddy Bear, a contemporary Nigerian family drama about grief, masculinity, and caregiving.
The three filmmakers join a cohort of storytellers from Nigeria and Kenya selected for a programme with a specific and unusual brief: developing entertainment media — films, television, podcasts, social content — that brings Christian and Muslim faith perspectives together around questions of gender representation, aimed particularly at challenging harmful norms affecting girls and young women. It is a programme built to work through faith communities rather than around them, treating faith-inspired storytelling as a serious vehicle for social narrative change rather than a separate, lesser category of content.
Who’s Behind Daddy Bear
Azeez brings a specific and relevant credential to a story about grief and caregiving: she directed and wrote for African Folktales, Reimagined, the Netflix-UNESCO anthology series, including the widely noted episode Halima’s Choice, and directed the feature With Difficulty Comes Ease. Nwaturuocha has produced or executive produced a run of recent Nigerian independent work, including Azeez’s own With Difficulty Comes Ease and Ekene Som Mekwunye’s Ewo. Alli, a 2021 alumna of the EbonyLife Creative Academy, is known for the short film Monitoring Spirits. Between them, the trio has the kind of mid-career independent credibility — real credits, no breakout hit yet — that makes a film like Daddy Bear a genuine test case for whether faith-anchored development funding can produce work with crossover reach beyond its funding brief.
Why the Financing Model Is Worth Noticing
RollCallAfrica has spent much of this year documenting what we’ve called the proven-partner economy — the tendency of Netflix, Canal+, and Amazon alike to concentrate capital on filmmakers and studios who have already had a commercial breakthrough, leaving early and mid-career talent with vanishingly few paths to financing. The Africa No Filter/CcHUB model is a genuine alternative to that pattern, and it is worth naming as one. It is grant-based rather than commissioning-based, mission-driven rather than platform-driven, and explicitly aimed at filmmakers who have credits but not yet a hit — precisely the tier the proven-partner economy leaves stranded.
It is also, notably, a Nigeria-Kenya programme rather than a Nigeria-only one, continuing Africa No Filter’s pattern of pairing filmmakers across the two countries’ industries — the organisation’s past Nigerian support includes The Other Side of the Bridge, Evi, and Onobiren, alongside Kenyan titles including Likarion Wainaina’s Anam’s Wake. A funding body deliberately building a joint Nigeria-Kenya pipeline, rather than running two separate national programmes, is a small piece of the cross-border infrastructure this publication keeps arguing the continent’s mid-tier film industries need more of.
What to Watch
Daddy Bear is early — a cohort selection, not a greenlit production, with no production timeline yet announced. What makes it worth flagging now, rather than waiting for a further announcement, is the model itself: three credible, non-breakout Nigerian filmmakers getting real development support from a coalition that isn’t chasing a subscriber number or a festival premiere, but a narrative-change mandate with genuine funding behind it. If it produces a film with the emotional reach of its brief — a grief-and-masculinity story that could travel well past its faith-storytelling funding category — it will be a useful data point for how much unconventional financing routes can do for filmmakers the platform economy has stopped reaching. RollCallAfrica will track the project’s development.
— Adaeze Okoye. RollCallAfrica, Lagos. 31 August 2026. Sources: Africa No Filter official (2026 cohort announcement), CcHUB Creative Economy Practice.
