Shasha, the world’s first streaming service for South-West and North African cinema, announces a new programme

Shasha Movies, an independent streaming service for South-West Asian and North African cinema which launched last year, has released its new programme in association with The Africa Institute (Sharjah), celebrating the work of Afro-Arab identifying filmmakers. From 1 February – 31 March 2022, audiences anywhere will be able to watch 20 films (from the 1970s to the present day) curated by Shasha that together prompt reflection, discussion and most importantly, action.

“Ran by a small team of women from the region, Shasha is a way for us to bring our cinema back to those it is made for and about,” Róisín Tapponi, Shasha founder and CEO, tells It’s Nice That. The streaming service presents an incredible selection of cinema – 20 films every month – that, uniquely for a streaming platform, are available to stream anywhere globally – in its original language and with English subtitles. As Tapponi explains: “So often our cinema gets contained within the European film festival, we also aim to bring our cinema to an international audience in an intelligent and careful way.” Shasha strives to serve “filmmakers first and foremost, and bring SWANA cinema to a local and international audience.”

In its latest season, you’ll find titles including Veganize it!, a 2012 comical short about the challenges Bakr, a young Sudanese man, faces becoming vegan; Ali au Pays des Merveilles (Ali in Wonderland) a 1976 experimental and political film about the experience of immigrant workers in France in the mid-1970s; and Issraa El-Kogali’s documentary short In Search of Hip Hop, featuring a collection of young men who call themselves Hip Hop Artists in Khartoum. “It’s an incredibly diverse programme, there’s so many different and beautiful stories on there! I have worked with many of the filmmakers on numerous occasions over the years, it has been a pleasure to watch their work grow,” Tapponi continues. “We are partnering with The Africa Institute in the UAE, who have enabled us to present six films for free on the platform, coming end of February.”

Tapponi concludes: “I came into the streaming service business as a film programmer, not an investment banker like pretty much all other streaming services – we’re all active in the regional film industry, and want to make something for our community to be proud of.”