At this year’s Venice event, six films from African directors will screen at the festival, while two films from African directors will premiere at the festival’s sidebar event, the Venice Critics Week.
By Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku
The Venice International Film Festival, the oldest international film festival in the world and one of the big four film festivals, returns for its 82nd edition this August, running from 27th August to 6th September 2025. At this year’s Venice event, six films from African directors will screen at the festival, while two films from African directors will premiere at the festival’s sidebar event, the Venice Critics’ Week.
Making its world premiere in the Main Competition is The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025 – Tunisia, France) by Tunisian director, Kaouther Ben Hania, famous for her Academy Award-nominated film, The Man Who Sold His Skin (2020), which premiered at the 77th Venice International Film Festival.
Inspired by a true story, The Voice of Hind Rajab uses a hybrid documentary-fiction approach to re-enact the story of the eponymous Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza in 2024. The film captures Rajab’s harrowing last moments as she makes an emergency call to Red Crescent volunteers who desperately try to save her.
Screening Out of Competition is My Father and Qaddafi (2025 – Libya, USA), the debut documentary feature of Libyan director, Jihan K. The documentary follows the director as she pieces together the memory of her father, Mansur Rashid Kikhia, a Libyan human rights lawyer, Foreign Minister, and ambassador to the United Nations, who became an opposition leader after serving in Qaddafi’s regime, and whose body was found in a freezer near Qaddafi’s palace nineteen years after his disappearance.
Moroccan director, Maryam Touzani, features in the Venice Spotlight section with Calle Malaga (2025 – Morocco, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium), a Spanish-language film about an aging woman who is forced out of her home when her daughter decides to sell it without consulting her. In the course of fighting to keep her home and reclaim her belongings, Maria Angeles rediscovers love and desire.
Touzani is internationally acclaimed for her previous films, Adam (2019) and The Blue Caftan (2022), both of which screened in both the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Calle Malaga has also been selected to screen at the Special Presentations section at this year’s TIFF.
With respect to short films, participating in the Orizzonti Short Films International Competition is Olubunmi Ogunsola’s Saint Simeon (2025). Set in 1997 Enugu, Nigeria, Saint Simeon follows a young seminarian who is torn between feelings of guilt and carnal desires in a repressed environment in the wake of the passing of his roommate Simeon, and his controversial suicide.
On the other hand, Boomerang Atomic (2025), set in 1960 Reggane, Algeria where France detonated its first atomic bomb, will play among the short films Out of Competition. Credited as a French film, Boomerang Atomic is directed by acclaimed French-Algerian filmmaker, Rachid Bouchareb, a regular on the international film festival circuit with multiple appearances at Venice, Cannes, and the Berlin Film Festival.
As a special mention, also screening in the Venice Spotlight section is Hijra (2025 – Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, United Kingdom), about two different generations of Saudi women as they journey across the desert to Mecca to find a missing teenage girl. Although a film by Saudi director and Venice Festival returnee, Shahad Ameen, Hijra is co-produced by Film Clinic, a leading Egyptian production house.
In addition to the films screening in the Competition, Out of Competition and Spotlight sections, the continent is also represented in the Biennale College Cinema section, which is a project of the Venice Biennale that promotes emerging filmmakers and provides them with the opportunity to work with masters to make new micro-budget feature films.
In October 2024, Afrocritik reported that the Biennale College Cinema had selected the collaborative film, One Woman, One Bra (2025 – Kenya, Nigeria) as one of twelve films chosen for the programme. While the film was still in development at the time, it will now be screened at the festival this year.
The debut feature of Kenyan filmmaker, Vincho Nchogu, and produced by Nigerian filmmaker, Josh Olaoluwa, One Woman, One Bra explores the tensions of personal ambition, cultural reclamation, and ethical dilemmas through a 38-year-old woman whose unknown parentage and unmarried status put her at risk of losing her home when kinship ties become the basis of land ownership in her village.
Beyond the main event, Africa will also make her mark at the 2025 Venice Critics’ Week, an independent and parallel section of the Venice Film Festival organised by the Union of Italian Film Critics. Two films by African directors will screen In Competition at the Critics’ Week.
Cotton Queen (2025 – Germany, France, Palestine, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia), by Sudanese-Russian filmmaker, Suzannah Mirghani, follows a teenage girl in a cotton-farming village in Sudan whose way of life is threatened when a young businessman from abroad wants to marry her.
And Roqia (2025 – Algeria, France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia), a horror film by Algerian director, Yanis Koussim, unfolds over two parallel time periods—a past where a man suffers amnesia after an accident, and a present where the disciple of an old Muslim exorcist worries that his master’s Alzheimer’s may unleash a long-contained evil.
The contingent at this year’s Venice International Film Festival and the Critics’ Week sidebar represents a stronger African presence than is typical and signals not only the growing recognition of the African film industry on the global stage but also the diversity in stories and the range in filmmaking approaches.
Whether revisiting history or grappling with the present, these films bring urgent and distinctive perspectives, many of them rooted in African and Middle Eastern perspectives, to one of the world’s most prestigious film stages.