Through her organization Shoowa, Lysiane Ngoye is building an independent audiovisual production company dedicated to telling the stories of Black people and the Francophone world. Incubated by MansA Lab as part of its first cohort, she is working to bring stories that are still underrepresented on screen to life, from a journalistic perspective to audiovisual production.
By Selma Chougar
Published on May 21, 2026
For years, Lysiane Ngoye has been observing the stories of others. First as a cultural journalist—a behind-the-scenes writer for music media in the late 2000s—then as a film festival programmer, editor-in-chief, TV producer, and tech strategist at Meta. Today, all these paths converge on a single project: Shoowa, an audiovisual and film production company dedicated to Francophone Black narratives.
“I always knew that at some point I would make movies,” she says. But more than just a desire to produce, Shoowa stems from a broader ambition: to regain control over the imagination. “Telling stories, choosing, structuring, conveying, and then producing: for me, all of that is part of the same process.”
Lysiane Ngoye’s career has mirrored the transformations in the media over the past twenty years. She began writing at a time when online media were still struggling to gain recognition. Music, film, and Afro-diasporic cultures: very early on, her interests already formed a clear map. For her, music is never just about sound; it is political, social, and historical.
This obsession with storytelling then led her to curate the Black Movies Summer festival, where she refined her curatorial perspective on Francophone, Caribbean, African, and South American Black diasporas. Next came television, followed by a decisive detour into the tech industry. At Meta, she helped launch Reels in France and discovered a whole new language: that of data, algorithms, and large-scale content strategies.
Far from being an opportunistic shift, this experience directly enriches Shoowa. “Production isn’t just about editorial or artistic aspects—it’s also a business,” she points out. Understanding user behavior, designing flexible formats, and balancing a human perspective with algorithmic logic: these are all tools she is now applying within her company.
But the heart of the project lies elsewhere: in what she calls “stories of the in-between.” These are stories that are still rarely told in the French-speaking world—the stories of children of the diaspora, caught between multiple places, multiple heritages, and sometimes multiple languages. “We have stories about Africa, stories about the West, but very few about this in-between space that we nevertheless experience every day.”
Shoowa will first develop documentaries that blend music and identity. Fiction will come later. “There are still too many gaps in our Francophone narrative fabric,” she says. The MansA incubator is currently supporting this development phase. For Lysiane Ngoye, the main appeal lies in this space where the legitimacy of stories from people of African descent doesn’t have to be constantly justified. It’s a framework that allows her both to structure her business and to fully embrace her ambition.
