The 2026 JFF festival culminated in an Awards Gala on Sunday night, marking its closure and honouring outstanding narratives and creatives platformed throughout the six-day occasion.
By Adedamola Jones Adedayo
The 2026 Joburg Film Festival (JFF), held from 3rd to 8th March, showcased the city as a vibrant centre for storytelling and cinematic celebration, bringing together stakeholders and industry professionals from across the continent and beyond.
Under the theme “Feel the Frame”, the festival included a diverse lineup of films, from dynamic African narratives to international titles across feature, short film and documentary formats and even student projects. Apart from the screenings, JFF also featured workshops, panels, and the JBX Content Market, an atmosphere of free flow of thoughts between filmmakers, critics and cinephiles, towards the celebration of cinema as a mirror of culture, identity and imagination.
The official screening schedule of the festival listed 73 titles, cutting across different genres, from comedy (such as Klawerjas) to socially engaging narratives like Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar’s Variations On A Theme and even more sensitive dramas bordering on socio-political tensions, such as Moges Ababu’s Mother Country and Jordy Sank’s Amazeze (Fleas).
This year was the JFF’s biggest edition, with reports noting that festival curator Nhlanhla Ndaba and other organisers welcomed a record 770 submissions from about 100 countries, leading to a final list of less than 100 films.
The festival culminated in an Awards Gala on Sunday night, marking its closure and honouring outstanding narratives and creatives platformed throughout the six-day occasion. Topping the list of award winners is Marie-Elsa Sgualdo’s Silent Rebellion, a Swiss period drama mirroring life in a repressive 1940s rural Protestant community, which won both Best Feature Film and Best Cinematography awards, with actress Lila Gueneau honoured with a Special Mention for her performance in the film.
Still basking in the glow of the Tiger Award for Best Competition Film prize at the 2026 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar’s Variations on a Theme, a narrative exploring community resilience in South Africa’s Northern Cape, scooped the 2026 JFF’s Best African Film award; whereas Nolitha Refilwe Mkulisi’s Let Them Be Seen, a Germany-South Africa co-production mirroring Tapoleng, a region popular for its dense concentration of churches, won the Best Documentary accolade.
Other winners were Ondřej Provazník’s Broken Voices, a drama set in 1990s Czech Republic, which won Best Edit; Tevin Kimathi Omwanza’s Stero, the story of a boy’s confrontation with physical and psychological violence, which won Best Short Film; Khaya Dube’s Umxoxiso, a short film on grief, community and youth-centered conversation, awarded as the winner of the Young Voices Competition; George Temba who won the Best Student Film prize for The Silent Inheritance, an essay film about a young man in search of identity and purpose; and Veteran South African producer Harriet Gavshon who got a Special Recognition.
Partners for this year’s JFF included broadcast giant MultiChoice, UK in South Africa, Netflix South Africa, Movie Room, Gauteng Film Commission, The Star Newspaper, Talk Radio Station, 702, The Butcher Shop and Grill, Greek Mediterranean Restaurant, and La Parada Tapas Bar.