Data access for researchers and libraries

Sankofa is a structured catalogue of African and diaspora cinema — 10,552 titles across 54 countries, assembled and cleaned over months from open sources. The catalogue is browsable free by anyone. This page is for institutions that need the underlying data.

What makes this different from a general film database

Large commercial databases hold African titles, but they hold them incidentally — country data is frequently absent or records only the European co-producer, and African festival results are largely unindexed. Three things here are not readily available elsewhere:

• Verified country of origin. Country claims are cross-checked against Wikidata rather than taken from a single source, because a Senegalese film financed in France is routinely filed as French. Co-productions record every country, not just the first.
• African festival awards. AMAA (99), FESPACO (49), ZIFF (9), AFRIFF (8), FIFM (3), CIFF (1) — wins and nominations distinguished, each with a source citation. This is the differentiator; no general database indexes FESPACO or AMAA results as structured data.
• Language and scene classification. Records distinguish Yoruba-language Nollywood from English-language Nollywood, Maghrebi from Egyptian, Lusophone from Francophone — the distinctions the field actually works in.

Provenance

Every field written by an import script also writes a row recording the provider, the field and the source URL. If a value is ever questioned, that table answers “where did this come from” without guesswork — which matters if the data is going to be cited.

The catalogue is built from Wikidata (CC0), Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), and the TMDB API, plus hand-verified festival records drawn from published results.

What can and cannot be licensed

Being direct about this, because rights clearance is usually the first question an institution asks:

• Available: the festival award records, the country-of-origin verification, the language and scene classification, the theme and genre assignments, and the provenance records. This is the work that took the time, and it is the part that is genuinely ours to share.
• Not available for redistribution: fields sourced from the TMDB API, whose terms permit use but not resale. Wikidata-derived fields are CC0 and carry no such restriction; Wikipedia-derived text is CC BY-SA and carries an attribution and share-alike obligation that travels with it.
• No film content. Sankofa holds metadata only. It does not host, stream or license any film, and can convey no rights in any work it describes.

Getting access

There is no self-serve plan. Access is arranged case by case — tell us what you’re researching or building and what shape you need the data in (a one-off export, a scheduled extract, or a live endpoint), and we’ll work out whether it’s a fit.

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Students and individual researchers: the site itself is free and always will be, and everything above is browsable at /browse without an account. You only need this page if you need the data in bulk.