Abdulai Jalloh’s journey from student filmmaker to media entrepreneur

In this edition of Offscript, the Guinean-American media entrepreneur talks about building BorderNation, a pan-African storytelling company, straight out of high school.

“I used to walk around as a college student with business cards in my hands.”

Abdulai Jalloh says this with a nostalgic grin that hovers between pride and disbelief. Back then, the cards read CEO, Borderline Pictures, though there was barely a company to speak of. What existed instead was a restless imagination, a knack for storytelling, and the stubborn belief that he could build something meaningful before anyone else thought it possible.

Twelve years later, that conviction has turned into Bordernation, a global storytelling and media company connecting African and Western audiences through film and documentary work.

Jalloh’s story is defined by duality: two continents, two upbringings. He was born in Conakry, Guinea, and spent his first decade surrounded by family and community, raised mostly by his grandmother while his parents built a life in America. Guinea, he recalls, was defined by warmth and rhythm, a place where everyone belonged.

Moving to Brooklyn at twelve upended the tranquillity of his childhood. The language, pace, and culture were foreign. Yet the chaos of the city, much like Lagos, demanded confidence and adaptability. “Brooklyn is like Lagos on steroids,” he says with a laugh. “Where it’s just fast, and chaotic, but it’s the most amazing place to be as well, because it instils in you a spirit that you can take anywhere around the world and know that you’re good.”

In adulthood, Jalloh often describes himself as the product of these two places: the empathy of Conakry combined with Brooklyn’s fearless hustle. It is this blend of sensitivity and grit that would guide him from adolescence into entrepreneurship.

From an early age, Jalloh’s ambitions were vast and somewhat scattered. “I wanted to be three things: a diplomat, a banker, or a journalist,” he says. Diplomats, he recalls, seemed like the most successful people in Africa. He joined his school’s Model United Nations, where he represented countries at mock UN sessions. But while he thrived there, storytelling began to pull harder.

His high school was located near the New York Film Academy, and he applied to study there after graduation, but the cost of tuition made that dream impossible. Instead, he found another path: a community programme called Reel Lives, which taught inner-city kids to tell stories through film. There, he learned to handle a camera for the first time — a Canon 7DS — and discovered the language of light, lenses, and framing.

The experience was transformative. Mentored by Lyle Kane, founder of Reel Lives, Jalloh left the programme determined to start something of his own. “Once it ended, I told them, ‘I want to form a company to do this.’ I had no idea what I was doing, but they helped me set it up, anyway.” And just like that, Borderline Pictures, a nod to his cross-continental identity, was born.

Running a company as a teenager came with predictable chaos. Jalloh barely understood the workings of a business, but he had conviction. In the university, he juggled his classes with full-time work at the Rockefeller University Research Centre to fund his shoots. Each semester began with Jalloh negotiating with professors for flexible deadlines in exchange for completed assignments. “I’d be on a film set in San Francisco on Saturday and back in class on Monday,” he says. The grind, he insists, built his discipline. “That balance taught me everything about deadlines, about never giving up.”

There were setbacks, but also small wins. One of Borderline’s early commissions came from the Africa Society in Washington, D.C., for a documentary titled Bridging the Gap. The film’s success led to an invitation to screen it at Harvard. Another project, centred on the Nigerian diaspora in America, introduced him to a network of African executives in the U.S. who became early collaborators and mentors.

His small teenage passion project was now becoming a company. But when he tried to trademark the company name, he discovered that someone else already had the trademark, forcing a rebrand. Borderline Pictures became Bordernation.

By 2017, Jalloh’s attention had turned to the continent he left as a child. Living in the United States made him aware of how Africa was represented, or more often, misrepresented in Western media. He noticed the paradox of Africans excelling in business and academia while remaining invisible in mainstream storytelling.

That imbalance inspired Explore Africa, a travel documentary series showcasing the continent’s modern reality. “The idea was to go to different African countries and show that Africa has cities, universities, science centres, not just animals and safaris,” he explains. Partnering with Ethiopian Airlines and local tourism boards, his team filmed across the continent in 2019. “As I travelled, I realised we hadn’t even scratched the surface of what Africa really is. That was the moment we went all in on Africa.”

From then on, Bordernation’s mission became explicitly Pan-African: to bridge perception and reality through media and storytelling. It does this primarily through Explore Africa and a series of events which highlight African success stories. In 2023, Bordernation partnered with Time Magazine and the Rwandan Development Board to host the first African TIME100 dinner in Rwanda.

If Bordernation’s work sounds like activism through storytelling, that’s because it is. Jalloh’s frustration with Africa’s media dependence runs deep. “We wait to be validated by institutions that aren’t in the business of validating us,” he says. “How many of our leaders would give Communiqué an interview before giving it to an international outlet? We prioritise others instead of ourselves.”

He’s especially critical of how African media ecosystems are structured. “Look at the BBC, most of its funding comes from the UK government. CNN advances American interests. But how many African media houses are subsidised to tell our true stories? None. We have 1.5 billion people on this continent, yet our narratives are still told through Western lenses.”

To him, this imbalance isn’t just about journalism but about power. “Media companies function based on their audience. We have the audience. What we lack are systems and processes to sustain independent storytelling.”

Bordernation’s next chapter pushes that idea further. The company is preparing to launch a private equity fund focused on African entrepreneurs. “We’re using our media platform and access to anchor these entrepreneurs across Africa and globally,” he says. “Creating a fund is still storytelling. We’re just telling a different kind of story now about African innovation.”

Through all the pivots, what stands out in Jalloh’s journey is consistency. He has never worked for anyone else and has built his company piece by piece since his teenage years. The milestones — screenings at Harvard, partnerships in Africa, a growing international network — matter less to him than the endurance it took to get there.

His proudest achievement, he says, is simply that Bordernation still exists. Twelve years after it began as a one-man operation, the company has survived the instability that swallows most creative ventures. “We built something and sustained it,” he reflects. “There have been ups and downs, but we never gave up.”

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