Côte Ouest expands its catalogue for English market

The distributor recently partnered with pay television station, M-Net as a sub-distribution, traditionally focusing on Hollywood and Latin American productions.

M-Net's African Film Library (AFL) is a large archive of award-winning African cinema, a project that took more than three years to build comprises of a vast catalogue of short films, feature films and documentaries from across the continent, available in a variety of languages and includes films by Senegalese legend Ousmane Sembene (Borom Sarret, La noire de...), Egypt's Youssef Chahine (Le Destin, Saladin, The 6th Day, The Land and The Sparrow), Senegal's Djibril Diop Mambéty (Badou Boy, Hyenes, Le Franc and Touki Bouki), Haïlé Gerima, Kwaw Ansah, Flora Gomes, Jean Rouch and Idrissa Ouedragou.

M-Net has spent years of research and has made significant investment in acquiring copyright to key African audio-visual content. The AFL also includes popular TV series such as Changes (originally from Kenya), Tinsel (from Nigeria), Egoli (South Africa) and African documentaries such as 'Great Africans Series', TV magazine shows such as 'Face of Africa' as well as select Nollywood films.

Bernard Azria, Côte Ouest's CEO, after having created the first distribution entity in west and North Africa servicing the large majority of broadcasters of these areas said "we are proud to enrich our offer to English speaking African markets with more than 1 000 hours of first class African TV content".