In 2009, Helen Kuun left the corporate world and started Indigenous Film Distribution, a company that does just that by focusing on South African and African content and helping the continent-s filmmakers to get their movies watched on a variety of platforms, including cinemas, DVD and television.

Since then, the business employs a handful of people who are highly experienced in the acquisition, distribution and marketing of films. They are dedicated to the promotion and growth of the industry, which we aim to achieve by developing an approach to distribution that is uniquely tailored to the South African environment.

This is how it works: Film producers oversee the process of filmmaking from development to completion. They bring us their films and if we agree to represent the films, we secure the best distribution possible for the films. We help filmmakers to determine how many copies of the film should be made for exhibition in cinemas, and we create a custom-built marketing and publicity strategy to ensure the film reaches its target audience. We work directly with movie theatres bookings people, like Ster-Kinekor and Nu Metro, as well as independent cinema owners in the SADAC countries. We negotiate the best deal for the filmmakers, taking into account the subject matter of the film, the overall quality of the product and its intended audience.