Encounters South African International Documentary Festival has unveiled the programme for its 28th edition, set to take place across Johannesburg and Cape Town in June 2026.
By Adedamola Jones Adedayo
Encounters South African International Documentary Festival has unveiled the programme for its 28th edition, set to take place across Johannesburg and Cape Town in June 2026.
Continuing its longstanding commitment to championing African storytelling and global non-fiction cinema, the festival will present a 10-day multi-platform event featuring a curated selection of African and international documentaries, alongside masterclasses, panel discussions, and Q&A sessions.
This year’s edition bears significant international momentum, including two early contenders for next year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary: Tutu (2026) and Nuisance Bear (2026). Tutu, directed by Sam Pollard, winner of the 2026 Berlin Peace Film Prize, is a US–UK–South Africa co-production that explores the life of South African Nobel Peace Prize-winning Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Nuisance Bear, directed by Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman, winner of the 2026 Sundance Grand Jury Prize, is a US–Canada co-production about a polar bear encroaching on human settlements as its Arctic habitat disappears.
Opening the festival is the African premiere of Zipporah Nyaruri’s Truck Mama (2025). The documentary follows the life of a single mother and truck driver navigating the Kenya–Sudan route. The film previously premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), where it was described as “a multifaceted portrait of the vivacious Eva and a nuanced picture of the emotional dilemmas faced by many economically independent women”.
Encounters 2026 will also host the world premieres of four documentary features from South Africa. These are Adrian Van Wyk and Chris Kets’s Notes from the Underground (2026), a music documentary based on the history of Cape Hip-Hop; Mmabatho Montsho’s Marxism & Period Pains (2026), bordering on how period pain affects the female gender in a capitalist society; Pat van Heerden and Edwin Wes’ The Hour After Midnight (2025), which investigates the death of trade unionist Dr Neil Aggett in detention during apartheid; and Elan Gamaker’s My Father’s Son (2026), following a first-time Zoom meeting between the Jewish director and his Black paternal half-brother.
The festival’s strong international lineup continues with award winners from HotDocs and Sundance: Poh Si Teng’s American Doctor (2026), the 2026 HotDocs Audience Prize winner, following three US doctors working in Gaza during the genocide; and Everybody to Kenmure Street (2026), the 2026 Sundance Civil Resistance Prize winner, which is about a Glasgow community uprising to stop the deportation of two neighbours.
High-profile portraits and biographical documentaries are equally part of this year’s showcase. Selected titles are Elon Musk Unveiled: The Tesla Experiment (2025), which traces the rise of Elon Musk and Tesla; two-time Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot’s The Eyes of Ghana (2025), focusing on Chris Hesse, cinematographer to Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first-ever president; Oscar winner Alex Gibney’s Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie (2026), an intimate portrait of the Booker Prize-winning author’s recovery after the 2022 assassination attempt; and Ryan Marley’s The Blind Couple from Mali (2026), chronicling the career of Malian musical couple Amadou and Mariam, as they become one of Africa’s most successful musical exports.
Two festival favorite directors from previous editions of Encounters make a return with new titles. Nicole Shafer, whose feature debut Buddha in Africa (2019) won the Encounters Audience prize, will now showcase Mama-Demic, which follows a maternity doctor navigating motherhood training in a precarious health system during the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, Sinéad O’Shea, who had sold-out screenings at Encounters last year for Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story (2024), reappears for the second year in a row with All About the Money (2026), placing the spotlight on a wealthy American heir who becomes a communist.
Additional highlights are timely documentaries that treat bold, topical issues. These are Raha Shirazi’s A War on Women (2026), exploring four generations of feminist opposition to Islamic Republic in Iran; Elephants & Squirrels (2025), spotlighting the ongoing struggle to have European institutions repatriate stolen human remains to Sri Lanka; Bea Wangondu and Andrew H. Brown’s Kikuyu Land (2026), following a man’s attempt to recover his family land that was taken during colonial reign; and Tshililo wa ha Muzila’s A Little Blackman from the Congo (2026), which shows the filmmaker walking the the Camino de Santiago in an orange life jacket, exposing Europe’s migrant crisis while reflecting on colonial influences on Black identity globally.
Completing the lineup are three more titles offering richly human stories from diverse global contexts: My Father and Qaddafi (2025), where director Jihan, in quest of truth and justice, digs into the disappearance of her father Libyan diplomat Mansur Kikhia; Marjolijn Prins’s Fantastique (2025), following a young gymnast in Guinea who dreams of joining the circus; and Tristan Forever (2026), which is about a 50-year-old doctor from Paris returning to settle permanently on the remote island of Tristan da Cunha, having forged friendship with a resident fisherman.
“Just when you thought the news cycle couldn’t speed up any more, AI arrived”, Festival director Mandisa Zitha reflects on the urgency of contemporary storytelling. “Encounters is an opportunity to slow down and look behind the headlines to better understand our world”.
Zitha concludes that, regardless of global instability, the Encounters’ eclectic slate offers perspective and hope: “It’s easy to get depressed at the state of the world at the moment. But this year’s lineup offers both inspiring examples of resistance and a reminder that, as Tutu said, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’”
The 28th Encounters runs from 4th to 14th June, 2026. More details are available on the festival’s official website.