Reading the news everyday, we are all familiar with the symptoms of this epoch, a barrage of horrors conjured by big numbers and dire images of future landscapes. In this project, we seek to cut through the noise by telling stories of the everyday experiences of being African. The documentary series explores, through intimate portraits and thoughtful conversations filmed across eight countries, how communities are experiencing and responding to unprecedented environmental and social change. Weaving together voices from different regions, we will seek to draw out the interconnected themes that shape life in this epoch, highlighting both challenges and creative responses emerging from the continent. We will emphasise the agency of Africans while recognising that the Anthropocene is largely not of our creation. 

The project seeks to document and elevate these stories, tug on the common threads,  and start conversations about being African in the Anthropocene. We chose storytelling deliberately to go beyond headlines, big numbers and key findings to engage with the multidimensional, often discordant experiences of people’s lived realities. Many mediums inevitably simplify — well-researched, unsentimental storytelling, in contrast, can help us gain deeper understandings of each other and counteract one-dimensional narratives. Although we will engage with a variety of Anthropocene-related themes, our unifying thread is everyday experience, in particular the impact on human bodies. 

Locations for filming include: Algeria, Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Madagascar, and South Africa. 

I wrote this brief to guide our country film crews, laying out the project purpose, goals, themes, narrative threads, and filming requirements.