Female producers and the structural transformation of anglophone Cameroonian cinema

This paper examined how female producers sustain and reshape Anglophone Cameroonian cinema. It argues that these women do not simply add to an existing industry but build feminist infrastructures that keep filmmaking going under conditions of institutional neglect, linguistic asymmetry, and gendered exclusion. Using feminist film theory, intersectionality, and Bourdieu’s notion of cultural production as lenses, the paper reads the work of producers such as Syndy Emade, Stephanie Tum, and Lilian Mbeng as infrastructural labour rather than isolated entrepreneurial success. The analysis drew on publicly available interviews, festival discussions, and sustained scholarly engagement with Collywood. It shows how women’s strategies of economic diversification, digital circulation, and informal training create opportunities for crews and audiences while exposing them to moralised scrutiny of funding, ambivalent reactions to Nollywood collaborations, and structural invisibility within Francophone-dominated cultural institutions. The paper concludes that supporting these feminist infrastructures through gender-responsive, regionally balanced cultural policy is crucial to the sustainability of Cameroonian cinema and calls for research that centres producers’ labour, tracks gendered access to capital, and examines how streaming platforms and digital circuits reshape opportunities in African minoritised cinemas.