Lights, camera, shortfall: who funds South African film when the state steps back?
Author: Tymicah Naidoo, Altvest Capital
South Africa’s film industry is entering a strange season. On paper, 2026/27 looks like a decent year for state support, with Treasury’s Estimates of National Expenditure showing R338 million flowing to the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF). Look one year further and the picture changes. Transfers fall to R166.3 million in 2027/28, roughly half, and the NFVF has just lost its governing Council. Its online application portal now reads “No applications open until further notice”.
The question for filmmakers, and for anyone weighing film as an asset class, is not whether the state still funds film. It does. The question is what kind of industry the state is now funding, and who is left to fill the gap.
The NFVF was created under the National Film and Video Foundation Act of 1997 to develop and promote local film, widen access for historically disadvantaged people and build scarce skills. It reports to the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture and lives almost entirely on government money, with 96.2% of its revenue over the next three years coming from department transfers. Its own income fell from R54.4 million in 2022/23 to R6.3 million in 2025/26.
What it offers is early-stage capital in the truest sense. Through competitive calls, it backs development, production, marketing and distribution, festivals and bursaries across features, documentaries, shorts and TV concepts. This is the money that turns an idea into a script, and a script into something a private financier will take seriously.
The 2026/27 figure is a sugar rush. In the February 2026 Budget, Cabinet added a once-off R178.1 million for the NFVF to run the presidential employment creative-industries stimulus, part of a R400 million package expected to create about 27,000 job opportunities. Strip that out and the NFVF’s core baseline sits at roughly R160 million to R172 million a year. Content development spending is projected to fall from R296.1 million in 2025/26 to R76.3 million in 2027/28.
The stimulus is doing what job-creation tools do: spending fast, in short cycles. PESP6 Blockbuster approvals went out at the end of September, and the PESP7 call closed on 7 October. But stimulus money is not an industrial strategy, and when it ends the base it leaves behind is thinner than before.
The people who will feel that most are not the big players. Large local productions and foreign shoots run mainly on a different pipe, the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition’s production rebate. The NFVF matters most at the bottom of the ladder, where its tier system explicitly makes room for new entrants and graduates starting out with shorts or concept development.
That ladder is losing rungs. Treasury’s targets halve funded projects in development from 70 in 2024/25 to 35 a year, cut projects in production from 62 to 22, and drop bursaries from 73 in 2022/23 to 25. An industry’s future hits come from today’s first features, and those are exactly what a shrinking development budget stops paying for.
Then there is governance. On 23 September 2026, Minister Gayton McKenzie dissolved the NFVF Council after it appointed one of its own members as Acting CEO, an arrangement the Council itself conceded was not lawful under the Act. He had flagged the problem in July and offered two lawful alternatives, and neither was taken. He framed the move as “an act of institutional accountability rather than a finding of dishonesty”.
The Minister has tried to ring-fence filmmakers. The CEO now acts as accounting authority, approved and committed funding will keep being processed, and a whistleblower investigation by the department’s Internal Audit unit continues. But he also admitted that the last dissolution stalled funding approvals for three months. For an independent producer with crew on hold, three months is not an administrative blip; it is the difference between shooting and folding.
What emerges is a funding system that is shrinking, stop-start and politically exposed. That is bad news for a sector built on state grants, but it creates room for private capital that understands the risk. Bridge finance against rebates, development slate funds, gap finance for independent features and co-financing with streamers hungry for local stories all become more valuable as the state steps back.
The state will remain the funder of first resort for emerging voices, and a properly reconstituted Council would lower risk for everyone. But the era of the NFVF as the industry’s anchor investor looks to be ending. The next generation of South African films may depend less on Pretoria and more on investors willing to price delay, and to back stories before anyone else will.
Original source: This article is originally by Altvest Capital, written by Tymicah Naidoo. Read the original article here.
