Idris Elba’s Shocking Move to Africa: Big Plans to Revolutionize Film Industry Revealed!

Idris Elba is fully engaged in his endeavors.

As a part of his continuous commitment to enhance Africa’s cinematic landscape, the Golden Globe laureate actor has plans to establish film studios in Ghana and Tanzania within the forthcoming decade. He believes that accomplishing this mission is impossible from his current residence in London.

“My goal is to strengthen the film industry, and that is a decade-long journey,” Elba shared with the BBC in a Tuesday interview. “I can’t achieve that from a foreign land. I need to be on the ground, within the continent.”

The leading actor of “Luther,” anticipates relocating “in the next five to ten years, if God permits.” He plans to travel across various regions — Accra in Ghana, Freetown in Sierra Leone, and Zanzibar in Tanzania — with the aim to “be where narratives are being spun.”

Elba’s parents hailed from Sierra Leone and Ghana respectively.

In August, Tanzanian officials finalized the allocation of a nearly 200-acre piece of land in Zanzibar to Elba, who intends to construct a film studio there, tentatively titled West African Studios. The studio is expected to be on par with those in “Hollywood, Nollywood or Bollywood,” potentially becoming “Zollywood,” as the country’s Investment Minister Shariff Ali Shariff suggested.

“We’ve been working on this for three or four years to devise a plan that places a facility at the heart of African filmmaking,” Elba informed the Ghanaian press in February 2023, highlighting that the current facilities are “insufficient.”

A 2022 UNESCO report stated that despite “considerable growth in production” — with the Nigerian film industry alone producing roughly 2,500 movies annually and generating total revenue in the hundreds of millions of dollars — African film production faces challenges such as piracy, inadequate training opportunities, and a scarcity of official film institutions.

“This sector is a soft power, not just across Ghana but across Africa,” Elba told the BBC, asserting that with proper resources and infrastructure, African filmmakers can contest the colonial narratives about the continent propagated by Western media.

“If you watch any film or anything related to Africa, all you’ll see is trauma, the history of slavery, colonization, and war,” said Elba, “but when you actually visit Africa, you’ll realize that it’s far from the truth.”

He added: “It’s crucial that we take control of the narratives of our traditions, our cultures, our languages, and the differences between one language and the other. The world is unaware of that.”

Apart from the entertainment sector, Elba also has intentions to create an “eco-city” on Sherbro Island, a tropical region located off the southwestern coast of Sierra Leone — his father’s birthplace. The project, helmed by Elba’s childhood friend Siaka Stevens, the grandson of a former Sierra Leonean prime minister with the same name, aims to introduce wind-powered renewable electricity to the country for the first time.

“It’s a dream, indeed, but I work in the realm of make-believe,” Elba told the BBC in March. “It’s about being self-sufficient, it’s about fostering an economy that sustains itself and possesses growth potential. I’m very eager to reshape the way Africa is perceived.”