The South African trailblazers seeking to change how wildlife documentaries are made
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- NEWF, founded by Noel and Pragna Parsotam-Kok after their 2015 South African wildlife series, has grown from a single dive "lab" in 2019 to a cohort of nearly 400 fellows drawn from 37 African countries and 13 more in the global south.
- NEWF dive training in Sodwana Bay — home to Africa's southernmost tropical coral reefs — has produced more than 200 certified divers, after the Koks discovered many African marine biologists could not swim, let alone scuba dive.
- National Geographic committed $1m–$1.5m (£747,000–£1.1m) in annual funding starting in 2022 for the five-year "Africa Refocused" programme, which built the eKhaya centre that opened in November 2023 with an editing suite, a 3.5-metre dive pool and 12 fellows' rooms.
- Silindile Mbuyazi (known as Mama Sli), who learned to dive in 2018 after her brother drowned in Sodwana Bay in 2015, has taught more than 150 NEWF fellows to dive and proposed building eKhaya on her grandmother's land.
- Music by NEWF fellows — including Okavango local Koolkat Motyiko — for a National Geographic film on Botswana's Okavango Delta won best original score at the Jackson Wild film festival, beating Hans Zimmer's score for David Attenborough's Frozen Planet II.
- Ethiopian filmmaker Elshadye Berhanu, on a two-month NEWF residency, filmed two female cheetahs jointly raising four cubs — a pairing she called uncommon — and is also working on a film about Mbuyazi due this year.
Why it matters: NEWF is the first pipeline of scale putting African filmmakers behind the camera on African nature stories, backed by $1m–$1.5m/yr from National Geographic over five years and a Jackson Wild win that outscored Hans Zimmer — concrete proof that locally scored, locally shot wildlife content can compete at the top of the genre rather than filling diversity quotas.
