Africa’s leading documentary festival, Encounters South African International Documentary Festival returns for its 28th edition between 4-14 June 2026, with screenings, masterclasses, panels and Q&As in both Cape Town and Johannesburg.
From the highly anticipated opening night film Truck Mama by Zipporah Nyaruri to TUTU, one of Variety’s five early Oscar contenders, directed by Sam Pollard, this year’s Encounters South African International Documentary Festival promises a powerful and thought-provoking line-up. Audiences can also look forward to Mmabatho Montsho’s bold new documentary Marxism & Period Pains, alongside a diverse selection of compelling local and international stories set to spark conversations.
“Just when you thought the news cycle couldn’t speed up any more, AI arrived,” says festival director Mandisa Zitha. “Encounters is an opportunity to slow down and look behind the headlines to better understand our world.”
Below is everything we know about the 28th edition of Encounters South African Documentary Festival.
What is the opening film at this year’s Encounters South African Documentary Festival?
This year’s opening night film is the African premiere of Zipporah Nyaruri’s Truck Mama. It follows Eva, a rare female truck driver on the Kenya-Sudan route, as she attempts to balance single parenting with long-distance travel. The documentary had its world premiere at IDFA, the world’s biggest documentary festival, where programmers praised the film as “a multifaceted portrait of the vivacious Eva and a nuanced picture of the emotional dilemmas faced by many economically independent women.” Book HERE.
World premieres of South African documentaries
Mmabatho Montsho’s Marxism & Period Pains
Marxism & Period Pain takes an in-depth look at women’s experiences of menstruation, locating those experiences within the gendered structures of capitalism. Focusing on the lived experience of being a woman in a globalised economy that barely acknowledges women’s reproductive health, the film features remarkably honest interviews with a cross-section of South African women, including educators, medical professionals, and school students. Book HERE.
Notes from the Underground from Adrian Van Wyk and Chris Kets
A music documentary tracing the history of Cape hip hop. For Cape Town’s coloured community, the language of hip hop connects them to the ancient energy of the region, while providing a liberation from both the strictures of apartheid South Africa and the neocolonialism that continues to define life in the city for many. Features the cream of Cape Town’s hip hop talent, including Ready D, Isaac Mutant, and Mutant’s daughter, Lyrix. Book HERE.
Pat van Heerden and Edwin Wes’ The Hour After Midnight
The Hour After Midnight is a haunting documentary that unearths the contested death of Dr Neil Aggett, a medical doctor and trade union organiser detained under apartheid South Africa’s Security Branch. In the hours before dawn, inside an interrogation cell, a young doctor struggles to hold together the fragments of his body and mind as a state determines which version of truth will survive. Book HERE.
Elan Gamaker’s My Father’s Son
In 2020, two estranged South African brothers, one Jewish, one Black meet online for the first time and, through a series of Zoom calls, begin uncovering a shared past shaped by separation, silence, and unexpected brotherhood. My Father’s Son moves between present-day video calls and fragments of memory as the brothers piece together a history held in archive photographs, home videos, cassettes, and family stories.
Early contenders for Best Documentary at next year’s Oscars
TUTU directed by Sam Pollard
Fresh from winning the Peace Film Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, TUTU will have its African premiere at Encounters South African International Documentary Festival this June. The feature documentary is an intimate portrait of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the rebel cleric and Nobel Peace Prize winner who helped end Apartheid in South Africa. Book HERE.
Nuisance Bear
Winner of the 2026 Sundance Grand Jury Prize. Shot in the remote town of Churchill, Manitoba known as the polar-bear capital of the world, this carefully considered film follows an adolescent bear who has been separated from his mother too early and becomes a nuisance to the local human population. Book HERE.
Award-winners from HotDocs and Sundance
Encounters will also host the African premieres of two of this year’s other big award winners.
- 2026 HotDocs Audience Prize winner American Doctor, following three US doctors – a Palestinian, a Jew and a Zoroastrian – working in Gaza during the genocide
- 2026 Sundance Civil Resistance Prize winner Everybody to Kenmure Street, which documents a Glasgow community uprising to stop the deportation of two neighbours
Spend time with Musk, Nkrumah, Rushdie and Amadou & Mariam
If you’re looking for big names rather than big awards, try these.
- 2026 Cinema Eye nominee The Eyes of Ghana, about Chris Hesse, cinematographer to Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. It’s directed by two-time Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot.
- Elon Musk Unveiled – The Tesla Experiment, acritical look at the rise of Elon Musk, Tesla, and safety concerns about their self-driving cars.
- Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, Oscar winner Alex Gibney’s intimate portrait of the Booker Prize-winning author’s recovery after the 2022 assassination attempt.
- Amadou & Mariam – The Blind Couple From Mali, following the Grammy-nominated couple until Amadou Bagayoko’s death last year, age 70.
Awards for Africa
Other awards favourites in this year’s lineup include.
- The Woman Who Poked the Leopard, about how Ugandan poet and activist Stella Nyanzi relentlessly opposed President Yoweri Museveni. Winner of the Prize for Solidarity, Humanity and Fairness at DokLeipzig.
- Amilcar, following Amílcar Cabral, who helped lead nationalist movements in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. Winner of the Award for Outstanding Artistic Contribution in the Envision Competition at IDFA in Amsterdam.
- Life After Siham, where director Namir Abdel Messeeh turns to cinema to cope with his mother’s death. Named Best Arab Documentary at El Gouna.
- Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror, the unlikely story of how the musical went from box office flop to the ultimate cult classic, still playing in cinemas 50 years after its premiere. Nominated for a Critics Choice Award for Best First Documentary Feature.
The return of festival favourite directors
This year’s lineup includes two documentaries from directors who have delighted Encounters’ audiences before.
- Director Nicole Shafer won the Encounters Audience prize with her feature debut, Buddha in Africa. She’s back this year with Mama-Demic, following a maternity doctor balancing motherhood and training within a collapsing health system during COVID-19.
- Director Sinéad O’Shea had sold-out screenings at Encounters last year for Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story. She returns for the second consecutive year with All About the Money, a portrait of a wealthy American heir who becomes a communist.
Timely documentaries to get you talking
This year’s lineup includes bold, topical documentaries that explore.
- Four generations of feminist opposition to the Islamic Republic in Iran, in A War on Women.
- The ongoing fight to return looted human remains to Sri Lanka from European institutions, in Elephants & Squirrels.
- Exploitation on Kenya’s tea plantations, in Kikuyu Land, which follows one man’s attempt to claim restitution for land that was taken from his family during the colonial period.
- The migrant crisis, in Tshililo wa ha Muzila’s A Little Blackman from the Congo, which follows the filmmaker as he walks the Camino in Spain in an orange life jacket
Documentaries for Africa
Other highlights include.
- My Father and Qaddafi, where director Jihan retraces the disappearance of her father, Libyan diplomat Mansur Kikhia.
- Fantastique, following a young gymnast in Guinea who dreams of joining the circus
- Tristan Forever, about a doctor choosing to settle on the world’s most remote inhabited archipelago, Tristan da Cunha, whose nearest supply route is South Africa
“It’s easy to get depressed at the state of the world at the moment,” says Zitha. “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.’”
Encounters will run from 4-14 June 2026 at the Labia Theatre, V&A Waterfront Ster-Kinekor in Cape Town, and the Bertha House Mowbray and Bertha Movie House in Khayelitsha; The Bioscope and Rosebank Nouveau, Ster-Kinekor Sandton, Ster-Kinekor Southgate in Johannesburg; and Brooklyn Commercial in Pretoria.
Full programme and tickets available at https://encounters.co.za.
