Docs showing at this year’s Festival

Like a surreal blend of Succession and Anarchy 101, All About the Money is a compelling portrait of a man for whom vast wealth had provided a buffer against virtually all consequences.

This intimate film chronicles the career of Malian musical couple Amadou and Mariam, whose joyfully infectious music has made them one of Africa’s most successful musical exports.

This urgently relevant film documents the experience of three American doctors in Gaza, as well as their attempts in the US to bring sustained attention to America’s complicity in the war.

A blind Afrikaaps hip hop storyteller in Eersterivier reconnects with his past through music, weaving memory, community, and survival into a rhythmic journey of feeling while reclaiming narrative power.

This beautifully made film about poet, agricultural engineer, and revolutionary Amílcar Cabral, who was born in Guinea-Bissau to Cape Verdean parents, takes an impressionist approach to its subject’s life and work.

Crowds surge through Tehran during the Green Movement, as Mohammadreza Farzad and Pegah Ahangarani weave archival footage with fate, revealing the inner lives of a resistance shaped by uncertain futures.

A moving look at how we attach narratives and memories to physical places, Before They Sold the Sky explores director Kai Reynolds’ family history and the impact of forced removals under apartheid.

Bones tells the story of Baartman’s final repatriation to South Africa in 2002, which was catalysed by a 1998 poem, “I’ve Come To Take You Home” by writer and activist Diana Ferrus.

In the Eastern Cape, Professor Pumela Msweli’s time banking initiative helps a rural community confront water scarcity, transforming shared skills into a system of sustainable change.

In Benoni, communities confront crime and neglect by cleaning their environment, revealing how resilience found in collective action challenges cycles of violence, poverty, and institutional failure.

This short doccie accompanies pianist Nina Schumann as she prepares to perform Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto No. 2”. It’s a piece that she’s performed many times before, but this time it’s different.

Curtain Call follows a group of young actors as they navigate the chaos, conflict, and camaraderie of a stage production. As the film reveals, the real drama unfolds long before the curtain rises.

A tribute to SiSwati author, Sikhonkwane Mahlalela, whose life of teaching and writing becomes a portrait of language, memory, and cultural preservation through the lives of those he inspired.

This engrossing film follows a Sri Lankan artist as she retraces the colonial-era journey of two men who collected numerous artefacts, including human remains, from the region and took them back to Europe for ‘scientific research’.

Elon Musk – Unveiled takes a close look at the rise of Elon Musk and Tesla, focusing on the safety issues with Tesla’s self-driving algorithms that have resulted in numerous fatalities.

In May 2021, an attempt to deport two residents of a Glasgow neighbourhood triggered a remarkable act of civil resistance from the local community. Everybody to Kenmure Street is an account of that extraordinary day.

The Eyes of Ghana tells the story of Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, who recognised the extraordinary power of cinema as a tool for resistance and cultural change.

After a life-altering accident, Dr Yvette Abrahams embarks on a healing journey through Indigenous knowledge, reimagining queerness, nature, and identity as fluid, ancestral, and interconnected.

A 14-year-old girl in Conakry pursues her dream of becoming a gymnast in the Amoukanama Circus, navigating family duty and ambition, as her world tightens around her future.

The Hands That Feed is a lovingly made tribute to the Stellenbosch restaurant Decameron, which has become a staple for anyone with a love of Italian food and tradition.

The Khaltsha Cycling Academy, Khayelitsha’s first all-girls cycling group, breaks binaries, finding freedom, independence, and sisterhood as they push beyond their neighbourhood’s expectations through cycling.

The Hour After Midnight investigates the contested death of Dr Neil Aggett under apartheid detention, uncovering state surveillance, torture, and decades-long struggles for truth, justice, and accountability in South Africa.

INYEMBEZI ZENDODA introduces us to artist Lwanda Dlamini, who was brutally attacked and left for dead. Unable to discuss his trauma with his family, his canvases are the place where he finds resolution and healing.

This heartrending film introduces us to Shorty, the Melville Poet, a talented wordsmith who has published two volumes of poetry while living on the mean streets of Johannesburg.

On the tea plantations of Kenya, it’s as if colonialism never ended. Kikuyu Land documents the attempt of one man to claim restitution for land that was taken from his family during the colonial period.

This documentary from Alex Gibney chronicles author Salman Rushdie’s physical and emotional recovery following the 2022 attack on his life, when he was brutally attacked by a knife-wielding assailant.

Filmmaker Namir Abdel Messeeh uses cinema to reconstruct his mother’s life after her death, blending memory, footage, and fiction to explore grief, identity, and the enduring presence of images.

South African filmmaker Tshililo waha Muzila walks the Camino de Santiago in an orange life jacket, exposing Europe’s migrant crisis while reflecting on colonial legacies shaping Black identity across continents.

Set in the small, remote town of Merweville, this heartfelt short doccie follows a group of emergency first-aid responders who care for sick patients while they wait for the ambulance to arrive.

Inside a South African maternity ward, a doctor balances motherhood and medical training, whilst confronting a collapsing health system, at the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this carefully considered stop-motion film, animation director Rebecca Blöcher tells the story of her mother’s quest for freedom and experience at a time when women were not supposed to want such things.

Featuring remarkably honest interviews with a cross-section of South African women, Marxism & Period Pain takes an in-depth look at women’s experiences of menstruation, locating those experiences within the gendered structures of capitalism.

A daughter reconstructs the disappearance of her father, Libyan diplomat Mansur Kikhia, uncovering a decades-long silence shaped by Qaddafi’s reign of political violence, in her search for truth and justice.

Two estranged South African brothers meet online for the first time and, through Zoom calls, uncover a shared past shaped by separation, trauma, and unexpected brotherhood.

A black-and-white cinematic portrait of Lagos’ Jebba Street, where archival photographs and memory intertwine to reveal a shifting neighbourhood shaped by survival, creativity, and the act of seeing.

Featuring the cream of Cape Town’s hip hop talent, including Ready D, Isaac Mutant, and Mutant’s daughter, Lyrix, this powerful documentary tells the history of Cape hip hop and its role in post-apartheid South Africa.

This carefully considered film follows an adolescent polar bear who has been separated from his mother too early and becomes a nuisance to the local human population.

Set in the Brazilian town of Olinda, this hyperkinetic film presents the battle between a communist mayor and a more traditional candidate as part of the same narrative that led to the local McDonald’s going bankrupt.

After 37 years at a Florida drive-thru, Sighle Williams’ final shift becomes a town-wide celebration of gratitude, turning routine service into a heartfelt collective farewell.

This exquisitely filmed short follows a group of four children as they play an online multiplayer game, collaborating on their strategies to advance while each trying to stay alive.

After the 2019 Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed his brother, filmmaker Teboho Edkins returns to the site, where grief, ritual, and landscape transform an open field into a living memorial.

A young couple leave Cape Town for rural Suurbraak, seeking belonging and healing as they embrace farming and community life, where love, nature, and time transform their sense of home.

At Johannesburg’s busy intersections, a street performer, Gift, balances spectacle with survival, as he navigates fatherhood, survival, and identity amid the fragile economy of the city’s margins.

Within neglected multi-storey hostels, Sonder explores Black Zulu queer masculinities shaped by surveillance, violence, and desire, where fragile performances of masculinity, intimacy, and survival are constantly negotiated.

This lushly filmed documentary plays out against incredibly beautiful landscapes. It’s not clear, however, whether the film’s title refers to the breathtaking beauty on display or to the behaviour of the tourists that the landscapes attract.

Strange Journey tells the unlikely story of the much-loved Rocky Horror Picture Show, which is still screening in theatres 50 years after its first opening, making it the longest-running theatrical release in film history.

During a blackout in Cuba, the city slips into darkness as everyday life unfolds through sound, memory, and fleeting light, revealing intimate rituals and shifting perceptions of what remains visible.

After studying abroad in Cape Town, a young filmmaker returns to Chongqing, navigating the complexity of modern life in China and fragile family ties, where grief, memory, and longing surface amid distance, silence, and change.

In Johannesburg, urban growers Siwe Ntombela and Forest Ramushwana reclaim indigenous foodways, exploring how ancestral knowledge, ecological care, and urban cultivation reconnect land, memory, and community while shaping sustainable futures.

For more than 30 years, Loran, a doctor from Paris has been visiting the remote island of Tristan da Cunha. Now, at the age of 50, he decides that he wants to make the island his home.

Evaline, a long-haul truck driver in East Africa, navigates dangerous roads and a male-dominated field while balancing motherhood and ambition, revealing the emotional cost of life on the road.

TUTU is a compelling portrait of the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a man whose beliefs and principles are more relevant now than ever before.

In Richtersveld, South Africa, botanists and conservationists battle organised syndicates poaching rare succulents, exposing a global black market threatening the biodiversity of one of the world’s most ancient ecosystems.

On the cliffsides of La Quebrada in Acapulco, divers plunge 100 feet into the ocean, where precision, bodily risk, and faith converge in a ritual of suspended, fleeting transcendence.

Four generations of Iranian women resist the Islamic Republic, transforming decades of oppression, protest, and personal sacrifice into a powerful feminist movement demanding freedom, dignity, and lasting change.

A journey through Cape Town’s layered histories, where movement and memory reactivate landscapes marked by colonialism, slavery, and Indigenous resistance, asking what was here and what remains.

A woman searches through the ruins of a demolished Addis Ababa neighbourhood for her partner, uncovering loss, displacement, and the human cost of rapid urban expansion.

This highly engaging account of Ugandan poet and activist Stella Nyanzi’s relentless attempt to challenge the violent status quo of President Yoweri Museveni makes for gripping viewing.