Selected films for the South African Film Festival will be made available through in-cinema screenings in Australia and New Zealand from 4th to 28th May as well as a virtual on-demand program running throughout May.
By Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku
The South African Film Festival (SAFF) is returning for its seventh year, scheduled to run from 4th to 31st May, 2025 both virtually and in select cinemas across Australia and New Zealand.
About thirty-two films will screen at the festival, bringing the best of contemporary South African-made films to Australian and New Zealand audiences, with feature films, short films and documentaries curated to showcase South Africa’s cultural and social diversity.
The festival will open with a powerful double screening of two of the country’s best films from 2024, Cindy Lee’s The Last Ranger which was nominated for Best Short Film at the 97th Academy Awards (the Oscars) and Muneera Sallies’ Old Righteous Blues (2024), South Africa’s official submission for the Best International Feature Film at the Oscars.
In The Last Ranger, a young girl is introduced to the magic of a game reserve by the last remaining ranger, but an ambush by poachers results in a battle to save the rhinos, while in Old Righteous Blues, a young man is forced to confront his limitations and face the ghosts of the past in order to unite a fractured community and realise his dream of leading his town’s Christmas Choir Band to former glory.
Both films will screen at in-cinema events in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Auckland, accompanied by opening night activities.
Also selected to screen at the South African Film Festival is the Best African Film winner of the 2024 Joburg Film Festival, Death of a Whistleblower (2023), a political thriller directed by Ian Gabriel about an investigative journalist who, after surviving the assassination of her whistleblower lover, sets out to expose corruption and state capture by a powerful private security force intent on promoting chemical warfare in Africa and the Middle East.
The 2025 edition of South African Film Festival will also feature a screening of Donovan Marsh’s 2010 acclaimed film, Spud, the film adaptation of John van de Ruit’s 2005 bestselling novel about a fourteen-year-old boy’s first year in an elite boy’s only private boarding school in the year 1990.
The closing film of the festival is The Showerhead (2024), a documentary from director, Craig Tanner, which examines the work of the cartoonist Zapiro, from his period as an anti-apartheid struggle-artist to his enduring role as a progressive commentator and champion of freedom of expression.
Other documentaries selected include Sara Chitambo-Hatira’s Black People Don’t Get Depressed (2024) which follows an array of characters as they make sense of their journeys with mental health difficulties; Lunga Matholeni’s I Did Not Ask for This! (2023) about a man’s journey towards healing after being sexually abused in juvenile prison; and Diana Keam’s Africa International Film Festival 2024 nominee, Don’t Be Late for My Funeral (2024), documentary about a retired domestic worker’s impacts on four generations of one white family during the apartheid era.
Also screening is Tara Erica Moore’s Legacy: The De-Colonized History of South Africa (2024) which won Best South African Documentary at the 2024 Durban International Film Festival and was longlisted in the Documentary Feature Category at the 2025 Oscars.
Selected films will be made available through in-cinema screenings in Australia and New Zealand from 4th to 28th May as well as a virtual on-demand program running throughout May.
The South African Film Festival is part of a group of non-profit South African film festivals operating in Vancouver, Toronto, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. According to the festival’s promoters, the net proceeds from the festival support Education without Borders (EwB), a non-profit that provides educational opportunities for disadvantaged and at-risk young people in South Africa.