“Netflix” by flickr user Jenny Cestnik.

This month, Netflix moved one step closer to media domination, launching its streaming service in 130 countries, bringing the total number of countries-where-one-can-watch-Netflix to 190, including India and Russia. (Notably missing: Indonesia, which banned the service because of its “unfiltered content.”) With some 70 million users and dozens of award-winning original series, the streaming giant is causing some in Hollywood to freak out. (Cable, meanwhile, is already in full-fledged panic mode with cord-cutting numbers rising dramatically.) But Netflix is only part of the story: Amazon, which closed 2015 with more US subscribers than Netflix, and earned serious accolades for its original series Mozart in the Jungle, Transparent, and Man In The High Castle, is now elbowing its way into film distribution. At Sundance this month, Amazon outbid Sony Pictures Classics, Universal, Fox Searchlight and Lionsgate to nab the Matt Damon-produced drama Manchester by the Sea. This is part of a larger trend of streaming services outbidding traditional theatrical distributors and is a major reversal from last year, when both Amazon and Netflix were shut out of the Sundance bidding, indicating streaming services are gaining ground not just with the casual watcher at home, but with directors, producers and actors on the international stage.

Canada Council commits to diversity regulations with teeth. Last June, the Canada Council for the Arts announced a major restructuring of its grant making programs, with plans to reduce its 147 separate programs–each with its own guidelines, deadlines and reporting–to six. The model will go live in April 2017, in honor of the Council’s 60th anniversary. Details of the plan emerged this past month, and the most interesting–and perhaps even radical–of them is the fact that the Council has decided to include diversity among the list of criteria considered when making recommendations of grants and grant amounts. For institutions with revenue of more than $2 million, the diversity of the arts “on stage” as well as that of the team “behind the curtain” will be judged. If your institution does not demonstrate a “commitment to reflecting the diversity of your organization’s geographic community or region,” this will now affect the size of grant received from the federal arts council. If the liberal government keeps its campaign promise, the Council’s annual budget will grow to $360 million over the next two years–enough for the Council to have a real impact on the diversity of the country’s arts organizations. The Council’s decision follows that of Arts Council England, which made a similar shift to towards increasing diversity in December 2014 (though organizations there have until 2018 to get in line.) The United States is not quite there yet, but the nation’s two largest cities seem to be laying groundwork in place: in New York, a survey by the Department of Cultural Affairs released this month indicated that by and large the city’s arts organizations do not reflect the city’s diversity, and Los Angeles County recently formed an advisory committee to examine “proposals that would lead to more diverse arts boards, staff, audience members, and programming at appropriate arts institutions.”

#OscarsStillSoWhite…but not for long? In what the LA Times described as “another embarrassing Hollywood sequel,” the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced for the second year in a row a roster of all-white acting nominees (and no best picture nominations for films focusing on minority populations despite various viable options). This prompted a resurgence of the 2015 hashtag #OscarsSoWhite (and the birth of its offspring #OscarsStillSoWhite), with actors such as Will Smith pledging to boycott the February 28 awards ceremony or calling for host Chris Rock to step aside. The Academy’s board and President Cheryl Boone Isaacs responded with an emergency meeting that resulted in a unanimous vote for “radical changes” with the goal of doubling the number of female and minority members by 2020. These include plans for reviewing and possibly revoking the voting status of the (94% white) lifelong members who are less active in the motion picture industry to make way for more diverse voters; an “ambitious, global” recruitment campaign (as opposed to the old small group nomination system); and the addition of three new board seats (to hopefully be filled by members of color). Though this year’s still-so-white Oscars announcement, and the Academy’s sweeping response, provoked a flurry of media attention (even a statement by President Obama), as we documented in our 2015 annual news roundup, Hollywood has been slowly waking up to the need to do something about its diversity problem over the past year. Despite grumbles from some established Academy members, the overall 2016 public and institutional reaction is in sharp contrast to Jesse Jackson’s failed 1996 protest against a similarly homogenous Oscars lineup. While the effectiveness of the Academy’s latest measures remains to be seen, one can be sure that the organization’s diversity efforts will receive some red-carpet-worthy scrutiny.

Philadelphia Media Network donated to the Philadelphia Foundation. In October, as part of a larger story on alt-weeklies and their perhaps dubious future, we noted that Philadelphia’s beloved City Paper had published its last edition. Philadelphia journalism captures our attention once again this month, but for much better reason. In a surprise move, H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest, the sole owner of the Philadelphia Media Network, gifted the PMN, which runs The Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com website, to the Institute for Journalism in New Media, a subsidiary of the Philadelphia Foundation. It’s the first time a major local newspaper has gone “nonprofit” since the advent of the internet, and the structure is certainly complicated. While unique and untested, the new alignment has the promise to preserve and enhance public-interest reporting while new electronic distribution methods are developed. The nonprofit status is not yet a done deal (the IRS has yet to weigh in), and the new format won’t necessarily solve outright the newspapers’ varied struggles. However, with newspapers continuing to struggle across the board, if this unusual structure is successful, it’s possible other papers will follow suit.

New directions at the Irvine Foundation. For the past year, James Irvine Foundation president Don Howard has been leading his staff in an deep exploration of what the foundation might change or do better. (You can read many of the responses to this question here and here, and Diane Ragsdale’s response, which pushes back against the foundation’s perspective that arts engagement is the most important issue facing the arts, here.) The foundation, which is the largest funder of the arts in California, has in recent years focused its resources on three areas, (1) engaging in the arts; (2) advancing democracy in California; and (3) preparing youth for success. Now, the foundation has announced an evolving focus: “expanding economic and political opportunity for families and young adults who are working but struggling with poverty.” This new direction seems squarely focused on two of those three areas, with the arts notably absent. The foundation has made assurances that it will remain committed to current grantees for the time being, and work continues apace on several existing programs, including the Arts Regional Initiative which just published a new report. In the long term, however, the arts’ role seems much murkier; a response to an inquiry about continuing arts support promises only that the foundation is “excited to explore how new initiatives focused on creative expression and the arts can be part of new initiatives aligned with our evolving focus.”

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Bruce W. Davis has been named President and CEO of ArtsKC, Kansas City’s regional arts council.
• Charles Thomas, an experienced social entrepreneur and civic innovator, will join the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as a program director based in Charlotte.
• The School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington, invites applications for a full-time lecturer faculty position in the area of arts management. Posted January 23; no closing date.
• The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage hiring a Senior Visual Arts Specialist. Posted January 26; no closing date.
• ArtsKC is hiring a Director of Programs and Grants to replace the retiring Paul Tyler. Closing date February 26.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• A research article published in AERA Open this month lends new evidence to argument for the benefits of arts engagement at an early age.
• Ingenuity’s third State of the Arts in Chicago Public Schools released this month details the arts assets available to CPS students in the 2014-15 school year.
• A longitudinal study of over 700 U.S. companies released this month suggests implementing diversity training programs does not actually increase diversity. On the flip side, a report published by Stanford Graduate School of Education found that at-risk high school students benefit from taking ethnic studies classes, which introduce a diversity of perspectives and may better align with personal cultural experience.
• New York attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman’s office sheds light on widespread abuses in ticketing industry in New York.
• A white paper from the National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University examines the distinguishing characteristics of arts organizations that primarily serve communities of color, in a response to the widely discussed (and criticized) report from the DeVos Institute on the same topic last year.
• Move over TV: Repucom, which researches sports and entertainment markets, surveyed adults between 13 and 34 in Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the United States and found that music is the top leisure interest for the millennial generation.
• Linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer analyzed all the dialogue from the Disney princess franchise and found that even in movies where the princess is the protagonist, male roles speak more than female roles.
• A few studies this month looked at art through a city lens. One, published in the academic journal Economic Development Quarterly, looks at the links between big performing arts organizations (those with budgets over $2 million) and the change in what Richard Florida defines at the ‘creative class’. A report commissioned by the Boston Foundation shows Boston trails other cities in institutional arts funding, and the Three-City Arts Study, released by Partners for Sacred Spaces, provides a scalable, replicable model for matching small to mid-size dance and theater companies having space needs with historic sacred places that have available space.
• Two reports this month looked at the contemporary art market. One, released by economics professors at the University of Luxembourg suggests that the international art market is overheating, creating the potential for a “severe correction” in the postwar and contemporary and American segments. Another looks at what kind of person who opens a private contemporary art museum.
• And finally, looking to the international stage, UNESCO released a report on the impact of the “Convention on Protection & Promotion of Diversity of Cultural Expressions,” and the 2016 Global NGO Online Technology Report provided insight into the global NGO sector and its use of online technology.

An image from the 2009 FESPACO Opening Ceremony. Photo by Suzy Robins.

This year my mother made her triumphant return to FESPACO, Africa’s premier film festival held bi-annually and always in Burkina Faso’s capital of Ouagadougou. She was back, this time with my father and I in tow, both of us galvanized by six long years of my mother recounting anecdotes from her last trip.  There was the Ouaga restaurant run by nuns who sang Ave Maria in an infamously off-kilter warble while carving your chicken. The late nights eating sticky fried plantain rolled in dried pepper at roadside jazz bars where one inevitably ran into several of the young bohemian American artists who had sunk all of their savings into a plane ticket to Ouaga and a pass to FESPACO and had no place to stay, knew not even enough to never order a drink with ice in West Africa, let alone the bribes, flattery and subtle threats inherent to any major third-world event. Beyond anything, there were the films, that, while, in the not-quite-familiar-enough-to-any-in-our-family language of French, were staggering.

I, for one, was excited. I was still secondhand high off the daily missives we’d received from my sister earlier that winter when she was a volunteer at the Sundance Film Festival. She had gotten close enough to Alexander Skarsgard to tell him she loved him and he’d giggled in response. She had ushered Will Smith and his son to their seats at a screening, wearing the special occasion calf-length faux-fur coat we’d bought her at a Burlington Coat Factory in Houston a month before.

Though I immersed myself in thoughts of a similar experience during the 15-hour car ride from my home in Accra to Ouagadougou, I don’t know who I thought I’d run into. After four years of schooling in the U.S. and one year of aimless wandering on a leave of absence from my small, private, liberal arts college, I am more ugly American than Ghanaian. And though I used to be an expert on the African movie channel offered on our satellite service and its tawdry Nigerian titles all inexplicably named after American celebrities, (Sharon Stone, Beyonce 2: The President’s Daughter), I could no longer remember any of the stars’ names, and doubted this was the caliber of movie to be screened at the festival anyway.

Ouagadougou was a feast for the eyes, endless aesthetic pleasure with its wide roads and modern geometric buildings somehow conveying Arab, somehow conveying, we hold history very close to ourselves here. More beautiful was FESPACO’s opening ceremony, which included a cultural display so wonderfully bonkers that it almost defies description. My most lasting memory is of 15-foot tall puppets of women in traditional Burkinabe clothing salsa dancing with their partners. These puppets were the women of the festival writ large.

There was a huge emphasis on women at FESPACO, something we were reminded of by the organizers repeatedly. That, this year, the guest of honor was the First Lady of Gabon and the film that was to officially open the festival was written, directed by and starring the same Algerian woman. The constant mention seemed—by turns—defensive, like an apology for an offense that would go otherwise unrecognized and aggressive, when it was regularly mentioned that, at this edition of FESPACO, every jury was chaired by a woman, unlike at Sundance, where not a single jury was.

The feminist slant went down a treat for most of the audience, especially with the white European families who called Ouaga home and the middle-aged black American women who collectively made up about 20% of the FESPACO attendees. The rest of the audience was mostly local Burkinabes as well as African filmmakers and filmgoers from all over the continent. There was also a contingent of the new phenomenon of predominantly white American exchange students sweating through their batik skirts and tank-tops who I recognized from their do-gooder ilk in Accra. They all looked vaguely pleased or indifferent; perhaps their French did not quite stretch to a discussion of gender politics.

My reaction had the two sides of myself, African and American, warring; I didn’t know whether to be proud that so many women were given a position of power at such a uniquely African event or shocked that so few women were at its American equivalent. It appeared miraculous to me that there would be such a vigorous debate on the empowerment of women in this city that seemed to exist nowhere, that rose out of the sand. But from the very beginning I had been impressed by the progressiveness of FESPACO and of Ouaga in general.

Ouagadougou had instantly seemed to me to be a land of women. There were thousands of them, mostly on motorbikes, their purses dangling from their wrists as they revved the puttering machines, their headscarves trailing in the wind, the kitten heels of their shoes stained red by the persistent desert dust. There was something feminine about this city. To my dreamy and romantic mind, it seemed, like an enigmatic woman, to hold some secret loosely in its grasp. I thought of the women on motorbikes, a sight I had never seen in Accra and then I thought of my sister, sharing a 3 bedroom condo with seven strangers in order to afford her volunteer position at Sundance; who’s empowered now?

I knew enough about Sundance to know that its leaders were not ignorant of the shocking gender gap between men and women in the film world; at the 2013 festival they released a study written in conjunction with Women in Film LA that examined the role of women in Sundance’s own history. This effort is admirable, but, in the face of what FESPACO accomplished, seven juries with seven female chairpersons, it seemed overly academic, especially considering that there were fewer female jurors at Sundance 2013 than in years past. It also seemed more thoughtful than FESPACO’s approach to throw as many women as possible into the mix after a 44-year history of no female chairpersons. I couldn’t help but wonder: how much of this celebration of the feminine was posturing?

This question was answered at the festival’s first screening, a film named Yema. Written, directed and starring Djamila Sahraoui, the movie opens with a woman, Ouardia, preparing the body of her son for burial and then digging his grave, placing him to rest despite her advanced age. This son is hinted to have been killed by his brother Ali who is the leader of an armed Islamic group. Ouardia is torn between her inherent love for Ali and her intuition that he is responsible for the death of his own brother. She lives completely isolated at the top of a rocky outcropping in rural Algeria, with only a one-armed shepherd who tends his flocks on her land for company. Ouardia spends most of her time tending to her garden, which becomes a metaphor for her strength, losing herself in heavy manual labor.

Yema is nothing if not a celebration of women, firstly because Djamila Sahraoui performed every major role possible in the creation of the film. But beyond that there is Ouardia, a woman put in position of choosing between the love of her two children, one already gone, the other being taken away by his own extremism, lost for all essential purposes. It is an excellent film, mostly silent, and mainly portrays Ouardia engaged in intensely physical acts-digging through the hard ground to create a grave for her son, pulling heavy buckets of water up from the simple well on her grounds to water her garden. The landscape becomes a character of its own. Harsh and unforgiving, it is still strikingly beautiful, much like Ouardia.

After seeing Yema, I understood that FESPACO’s obsession was not necessarily just with the feminine but with women like Djamila Sahroui, who is endemic of the kind of artist that makes it in Africa. At FESPACO there was a whole slate of ambitious female filmmakers, Africans, many of whom have lived abroad at some point, but realize the value of coming in on the ground floor of a cultural evolution that is sweeping developing African nations. For the first time, Africa has reached a level of sustainability that breeds homegrown artists, and not in a Beyonce & Rihanna 2 type of way.

Where it once was that every African filmmaker had to take the beauty of their lush heritage abroad to get their story told, now the continent is attracting its artistic talent back-African artisans are producing work in Africa for a global audience. That the selection of these artists at FESPACO was overwhelmingly female is fitting. Women have long been the gatekeepers of African history. For all the flexing and posturing, the tangible swag of the African male, African society is matriarchal. This new crop of female African artists are inheriting their traditional role as historian but giving it a modern twist, giving voice to the role of women in a continent that is rapidly developing, caught somewhere between third world depression and bourgeois ambition.

I saw then what FESPACO had that Sundance could not-an intersection between tradition and opportune timing. Africa and, to some extent, FESPACO are still deciding who they want to be. There’s a whole legion of female African artists who are not willing to step back and see themselves written out of those plans.

As the lights came up on Yema, I thought back to the drive to Ouaga and a teenaged boy I’d seen standing by the side of the road wearing a 3x ‘Say Neigh to Ketamine’ t-shirt and red snapback hat stitched with the initials T.I.N.A., This Is New Africa. Though he may not have known it, the boy in the red cap on the side of the road between Accra and Ouaga now seemed to be a seer of some kind. He was right: FESPACO was new Africa.