A director-led production studio.

I make films for African originals.

That sentence is the whole thesis of the studio. I want to unpack it before I tell you anything else, because it's the line that decides who we work with and who we don't, and because every word in it was chosen.

African, because the work is rooted here. The studio operates out of Kigali, but the films are shot wherever the story lives: Lagos, Cape Town, Accra, Kampala, Addis, Dakar, Maputo. I built the studio inside Africa, with African producers and African crews and African post-production partners, because the alternative (the model where Western agencies fly in, shoot the continent as backdrop, and fly out) has always produced films that look like Africa but don't sound like it.

Originals, because that word does two jobs. It means originators. The founders building things that didn't exist last year, the foundations funding ideas before they're fashionable, the institutions doing the unglamorous work of building infrastructure that will define the next twenty-five years. And it means original work. Films that don't look like other films, that don't lean on the visual clichés the African brand world has settled into, that don't reach for the same drone shot of a city skyline at golden hour every other corporate film has used since 2018.

Films, because we don't make content. Content is a word that flattens everything into the same word-count, the same shelf-life, the same disposability. We make films. Some of them are sixty seconds long. Some of them are eight minutes long. All of them are made the same way.

So: films for African originals. That's Gare Jesse.

Why the studio exists

I spent eight years operating inside the African startup and institutional ecosystem before I started Gare Jesse.

I founded and ran ventures across the continent. AXK, Rovify, OTJ, Afrikabal, Justly. Building digital trade and infrastructure for the Global South. I have sat on the buyer's side of the table, written the brief, signed off the budget, and watched the film come back wrong. I started the studio because I had been the client, and I knew exactly what the client was never being given.

What I noticed, over and over, was a gap.

The brands and founders and foundations I worked with were doing extraordinary work. Building digital trade infrastructure for the Global South, formalizing economies, taking African ideas continent-wide. The work was world-class. And then they would commission a film about that work, and the film would be fine. Competent. Corporate. The kind of film that sits on a website and gets watched by the procurement team and nobody else.

Meanwhile, the brands these African originals were competing against, the global fintechs, the international foundations, the European DFIs, were telling their stories in a completely different visual language. Cinematic. Considered. The kind of films that made you stop scrolling because they actually said something about who the company was.

The gap wasn't budget. African brands have budget. The gap wasn't talent. The continent has more brilliant directors and cinematographers and editors than any other emerging market on Earth. The gap was that the brands and the filmmakers weren't finding each other. The brands defaulted to corporate video houses because those were the names procurement knew. The filmmakers worked on personal projects and indie features and waited for international agencies to call.

I started Gare Jesse to close that gap. To be the studio that an African founder calls when they're tired of corporate films, and that a foundation calls when they want a documentary their grantees will actually share, and that a fintech CMO calls when they're expanding into three new markets and they need someone who can shoot all three without flying a crew across the continent twice.

That's the studio. That's what it's for.

The philosophy

I make films the way I'd make them if I were the client.

Which is to say: I make films that respect the audience's time. I make films that say something true. I make films that look like the brand has taste. And I make films that hold up two years later, when the campaign has long ended and the project has moved on, and someone stumbles on the work and thinks: wait, who made that?

There are a few things I refuse to do.

I refuse to make films that are committee-led. Every project at Gare Jesse is led by the director. Not handed down a chain of producers and account managers and creative directors and senior strategists, each adding their notes, each diluting the through-line, until what arrives at the edit suite is a Frankenstein's monster of compromises. If you hire the studio, you hire me. The treatment is mine. The shot list is mine. The cut is mine. That's the only way the work stays cinematic.

I refuse to make films that lean on the visual clichés of African corporate storytelling. No slow-motion handshakes. No earnest voiceovers explaining what the company does. No drone establishing shots of a city skyline followed by a smash-cut to a smiling employee in a hard hat. These shots exist because they're safe, and the entire reason brands hire us is because they want to feel safe. But safety is the enemy of distinction. Safe films get watched once and forgotten. Distinctive films get shared.

I refuse to compete on price with stock footage and AI-generated b-roll. The studio is small by design. Three packages. Pricing stated publicly. I take a finite number of projects per year, because the alternative, taking everything that comes through the door, produces work I'm not proud of, and clients I can't serve well, and a studio that ends up being indistinguishable from every other corporate video house on the continent.

I refuse to ship work that isn't ready. Every monthly batch delivers within a 3-week window of its shoot day. Inside that window, I'd rather miss a deadline by 48 hours than ship a film that's not finished. Every client gets told this on the first call. The clients who hate that response self-select out, which is fine. The clients who exhale and say "thank you" are the clients who renew.

The work

The studio works exclusively in retainers. We don't take one-off projects and we don't quote bespoke scopes. There are three packages, built around the same architecture: a monthly shoot day, a monthly deliverable count, and a director on call. What changes between them is intensity, depth, and the length of the commitment.

That's it. Three packages. No bespoke quotes, no "let's hop on a call to scope it." If the project doesn't fit one of these three shapes, the studio isn't the right partner, and I'll tell you that on the first call. See the full rate card →

The director

I came to the camera the long way round.

I'm Gare Jesse, a Kigali-based director and founder. I didn't go to film school. I came to filmmaking through building companies. I spent eight years founding and running ventures across the continent, and in every one of them I was the person commissioning the films. Writing the brief, approving the budget, sitting in the edit, and quietly knowing the work could have been so much more than it was. That frustration is the entire reason this studio exists.

So I picked up the camera myself. Not as a hobby. As a correction. I taught myself to light a room the way a story needs it lit, to direct a founder out of their press-release voice and into something true, to cut for meaning instead of length.

I see through three filmmakers more than any others. Bradford Young, for the conviction that darkness is information, not absence. Khalik Allah, for the belief that a portrait is a conversation. Akinola Davies Jr., for proving an African film can be specific, strange, and world-class at once. I shoot on the Sony FX-line, not for the spec sheet, but because it holds detail in the difficult, high-contrast African light that flatter cameras crush.

I started the studio because the films I wanted to make weren't being made for the people I most wanted to make them for. So I had to make them myself.

Gare Jesse, Director & Founder. Draft bio. Adjust the personal specifics in your own voice anytime.

How we work

The first conversation is fifteen minutes. We get on a call, you tell me about the brand, I tell you whether the studio is the right fit. If it isn't, if the budget is wrong, the timeline is wrong, the brief is wrong, I'll tell you on that first call, and I'll point you toward two or three other studios that might be a better match. That happens probably forty percent of the time, and it's the most important fifteen minutes of every project.

If we're a fit, I send a treatment within 48 hours. Two to three pages: the vision for the film, the deliverables, the timeline, the price. No surprise line-items. No "scope creep" addendums during production. The treatment is the contract.

If you sign, fifty percent invoiced upfront. The other fifty on delivery. We schedule the shoot. We assemble the crew. I work with a small, vetted bench of cinematographers, gaffers, sound engineers, and producers across the markets we shoot in, so we never fly a Lagos crew to Kigali or a Kigali crew to Cape Town when there's a brilliant local crew already on the ground.

We shoot. We edit. We grade. We mix. We deliver.

Then, if it went well, and it usually does, we talk about what's next. Most Quarterly clients move to The Standard at renewal. Most Standard clients move to The Annual. The studio's best clients start at one tier and grow into the next.

The studio

Gare Jesse is intentionally small. One director, a vetted bench of producers, cinematographers, editors, and post-production partners assembled per project. No standing employees beyond the director. No office. No overhead being passed on to clients in inflated quotes.

This is a choice, not a limitation. The model exists because it's the only structure that lets the work stay cinematic: director-led, taste-led, small enough to say no to projects that aren't right.

The studio is based in Kigali, Rwanda. We shoot continent-wide. Lagos, Cape Town, Accra, Kampala, Addis, Dakar, Maputo, wherever the story is.

We don't have a five-year plan. We have films we want to make this year, and clients we want to make them for, and a standard of work we won't compromise. That's enough.