Abstract: Cultural communication is of great significance to countries in shaping their national image and enhancing their national soft power. However, due to the influence of African politics and economy, African films always face the situation of insufficient production capacity in the film industry, internationalization experience, and film professionals. As a result, its culture has been discounted in the process of dissemination. In particular, African films have for many years relied only on video and other channels of dissemination, making it difficult to compete with the production and wide dissemination of films from Europe and the United States. Therefore, African films have only accounted for 4% of the African film market share in their home countries. 

In China, the digital dissemination of African films through the Internet has shown the following three trends: first, African-themed works that look at themselves in the light of the Western image of Africa; second, a large number of “video” films made in Africa and rooted in the national culture; and third, a small number of high-quality cinema films that have been the mainstay of African cinema since the beginning of the 21st century. This paper will take “Bilibili”, the Internet content community with the highest concentration of university students, as an example, and analyze it in light of the influence of African video culture on Chinese audiences and the current situation of the African film industry. In this way, we will explore how African films can explore cultural commonalities while ensuring a localization strategy, to realise the self-shaping of the national image in the international film industry.