Why is it racist to showcase African media? The founders readily admit in this thread that they are trying to get more exposure for all African cultures, not some African monoculture.
If we keep everything the same, but target a different demographic this service could be called: WhiteStream, a Netflix for whites and white-culture movies.
"The persuit of happiness" is classified as an Afro-American movie. Why is that? Does it portray black culture? Or is it because one or more actors have a black skin? I think it is the latter, because the theme from the movie is universal and transcends race.
James Bond is a hero, not because he is white, but because of his actions. Asking why there is no black James Bond is forcing race on an old fictitious English character (why do you care about the skin color of your heroes?). How to classify Morgan Freeman movies on the Afro-American scale? Add "Driving Miss Daisy" to the catalog, but leave out "Evan Almighty"?
"I’m going to stop calling you a white man. And, I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace and you know me as Morgan Freeman. You don’t say, "Well, ahem! This white guy named Mike Wallace." You don’t say it."
Is it positive discrimination ? Since there is a political implication there, I don't think so, but I will try to answer.
Do you know the movie "Ride Along" ? It did more than 100M$ in the American market for a budget of 25M$. This movie has one of the best start of any movie all time in January.
Do you know how we could see this movie outside USA. Not in a movie theater in France, though. Piracy is the first channel to see african-american movies in Europe and Africa.
Some movies are not well distributed and it appears so that a lot of these movies are from or with an African descent castings. That's not fair. We will correct this fact. And if you want to call this positive discrimination, why not.
Afrostream is a service which will permit to show movies which are not shown in a lot of countries in a legal way. That's our political statement.
this is my gripe with positive discrimination. it is still discrimination.
you could have been embracing everyone. but you did the same that was being done before, and picked the single second largest group. why not call it low-budget-movies-netflix. or hard-to-watch-in-france-netflix? why pick one group/race and leave others out? that is just ...bad business practice :) you could have been streaming iranian movies as well, for example.
you don't understand my point here : We do not do a service for specific people, we do a service with specific contents.
I will try with another argument : Tyler Perry is one the most prominent performer of the USA. He did movies, series, theater. All successful. He is maybe the most complete artist in the USA. These productions were distributed in the USA. You can't find these production in France by example, but either in a lot of countries. Why ?
Afrostream's goal here is to distribute Tyler Perry and other talents all over the world. As I said, I don't know if this is positive dsicrimination, but Afrostream is my political statement to this 'Why'
We don't need to deal with racism, we want to tackle it.
But in answer to your implied question "Why do you need a space/channel/site of your own?", the answer is that the larger space (France) is already white by default. Whites don't really need their own space, because they're the dominant majority, and media is generally made with them in mind already. So, if minorities don't carve out their own spaces, they will live entirely in a culture that doesn't represent them.
My fiance is half-black, and she's not that into TV/movies. I once asked her why, and she said that after a while, she just got tired of rarely seeing people like herself on-screen.
To demand that every company do everything is ridiculous. It is very American to think that focusing on Afro-diaspora culture is somehow "racist" or "discrimination." The company is launching in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Senegal and Ivory Coast. Why would they stream Iranian movies as their first move? Should they also include documentaries and calculus lessons?
Why pick one group, one business goal? Because they'd like to have a successful business and that's how you start.
The point remains valid - why isn't there a black James Bond? Because Hollywood doesn't think Americans will go to a movie starring a black hero. It's really a self-fulfilling prophecy - if you don't film the movie, they won't watch it.
(Driving Miss Daisy is not a great example of Afro-positive movies, but whatever)
this isn't the 50s anymore. i don't know about france. but hollywood is way past that
(17% of movies didn't even have a single speaking black character, as of 2013)
http://annenberg.usc.edu/pages/~/media/MDSCI/Racial%20Inequa... http://annenberg.usc.edu/pages/~/media/MDSCI/Gender_Inequali...
It takes a movie and cuts together every single word & sentence spoken by an actor of color. Often the intro music is longer than the compiled lines. Moonrise Kingdom: 10 seconds.
so are we going back to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaxploitation? how is that even portraying 'african' culture if you just get British culture and put black skin on it?
Blaxploitation (yet I would love to have this movie in Afrostream) was positive in a sens that it gives positive heroes who are black and it's very important to me that Black people think they could be what they want to be.
By the way, I dreamed to be Shaft when I was younger.
But let's face it, We don't have a lot of movies like that anymore, or they are not internationally distributed.
That's the question we want to solve with Afrostream.
And, again, African Culture does not exist.
That's the point of Afrostream, to have a great place to celebrate African Diaspora descendants and all of these different points of view.
Out of curiosity, are you going to include Egyptian films?
Let's face it : Will Smith played in a lot of top movies in this decade. Could you name another one ? :)
In France we have a Will Smith example too, His name is Omar Sy (saw in the last Jurassic World).
For one Will Smith, you have here in USA Tyler Perry, Kevin Hart, Chris Tucker, Chris Rock, Spike Lee (sorry for all the women I forgot here). These guys are awesome too. We want them everywhere in the world.