New York African Film Festival Unveils 2026 Lineup
The Opening Night selection is the New York premiere of Erige Sehiri’s Promised Sky.
The lineup has been announced for the 33rd edition of the New York African Film Festival (NYAFF), spotlighting 14 contemporary and classic feature films and 25 short films. They will screen at Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) from May 6 through May 12.
After May 12, the festival will continue at other esteemed New York City cultural venues throughout the month. Many filmmakers will be in attendance for post-screening Q&As. This year’s theme is “As the Stars Sow the Earth,” which celebrates cosmic agents that have sown memory, will, and possibility into Africa and its Diasporas.
Tickets go on sale Wednesday, April 1, at 2pm ET, with an early access period for FLC Members starting Wednesday, April 1, at noon. Ticket prices are $19 for the general public, $16 for students, seniors, and persons with disabilities, and $14 for FLC Members. Tickets and more information are available here.
The festival kicks off on May 1 at 6:30pm at the Africa Center with a Town Hall forum featuring multidisciplinary artists and storytellers who will be exploring and expanding on the festival’s theme. It continues at Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem from May 15 to 17 and at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) under the name FilmAfrica from May 22 to May 28 during DanceAfrica, and culminates with an outdoor screening at St. Nicholas Park on May 30.
The Opening Night selection is the New York premiere of Erige Sehiri’s Promised Sky, a bittersweet drama following an Ivorian pastor living in Tunisia, forming a makeshift family with the young women who find refuge in her home. The film opened the 2025 Cannes Un Certain Regard program and features a cast that includes César Award nominee Aïssa Maïga and Laetitia Ky.
The Opening Night premiere of Promised Sky on May 6 will take place at the Walter Reade Theater (165 W. 65th Street). All other films will screen at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center (144 W. 65th Street).
The Centerpiece film, from executive producers Barack and Michelle Obama and Oscar-winning director Ben Proudfoot, is The Eyes of Ghana, following 93-year-old photographer Chris Hesse on a quest to rescue an archive of films that could rewrite history. Closing Night will feature Shorts Program 3: The Art of Protection, including Shiloh Tumo Washington’s Bailey’s Blues; Justice Rutikara’s Ibuka, Justice; Catherine E. McKinley, Mamadou Tapily, and Marc Lesser’s Keïta La; Aminata Drynie Bockarie’s Where the Water Meets Us; Nimco Sheikhaden’s Exodus; Klein Ongaki’s The Land Smiles Back; Abdelkrim Boughoud’s Eauquation – Water Distribution at Douiret-Sbâa; and Marwa Eltahir’s 99 Names: My Liberation Is Tied to Yours.
Additional highlights include the world premiere of Gabriel Souleyka’s The Soul of Africa, a documentary exploring the origins, resilience, and contemporary relevance of African spiritual traditions; and the North American premiere of Hamed Mobasser and Yohane Dean Lengol’s Rumba Royale, following a young photographer (Congolese rumba star Fally Ipupa) who becomes entangled in the fragile social world of a legendary rumba nightclub in 1959 Léopoldville.
Two classic film restorations will have their U.S. premieres: Caméra arabe, Férid Boughedir’s passionate 1987 documentary linking politically engaged Arab cinema from the 1960s onward to major historical events, restored in 4K and followed by a Q&A with Boughedir himself; and a 4K restoration of Paulin Soumanou Vieyra’s 1981 film En résidence surveillée, a political satire set in a fictional African state.
The festival also features the U.S. premiere of Lace Relations by Anette Baldauf, Chioma Onyenwe, Joana Adesuwa Reiterer, and Katharina Weingartner, a documentary uncovering the history of the textile trade that has intertwined Nigeria and Austria for centuries. Idris Elba’s first short film, Dust to Dreams, about a Lagos nightclub pulsating with aspiring musicians but masking a family drama, is also included in the lineup.
Férid Boughedir will also participate in an extended conversation following the screening of his newly restored 1983 film Caméra d’Afrique. Special programs also include a digital exhibition in the Amphitheater at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center featuring select moments from NYAFF’s archival collection, including never-before-seen interviews, discussions, and photographs with a host of pioneering figures and friends of the festival such as Ousmane Sembène, Safi Faye, Bill Greaves, Sarah Maldoror, Harry Belafonte, Rita Marley, Danny Glover, Wole Soyinka, Miriam Makeba, and Ossie Davis. Photographs will be displayed alongside the digital exhibition, documenting the communities brought together through NYAFF’s programs, parties, and events over the years.
Selected 33rd New York African Film Festival Lineup at Film at Lincoln Center
Opening Night
Promised Sky
Erige Sehiri, 2025, France/Tunisia/Qatar, 95m
French and Arabic with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Wednesday, May 6 at 6:30pm – Q&A with Aïssa Maïga and Laetitia Ky
Thursday, May 7 at 2:00pm
Marie, an Ivorian pastor and former journalist, has lived in Tunisia for 10 years. Her home becomes a refuge for Naney, a young mother seeking a better future, and Jolie, a student carrying her family’s expectations. With the arrival of Kenza, a little orphan girl and shipwreck survivor, Marie takes on the role of caregiver. As the four women grow closer, they navigate poverty, displacement, and the fragile bonds of a makeshift family in a tense social climate. Selected as the opening film in the 2025 Cannes Un Certain Regard program, the latest drama from director Erige Sehiri (Under the Fig Trees) features a stellar cast including César Award-nominated Aïssa Maïga (Bamako, Above Water, Toussaint Louverture) and Laetitia Ky.
Centerpiece
The Eyes of Ghana
Ben Proudfoot, U.S./Ghana/U.K., 2025, 90m
English, Twi, and Ga with English subtitles
Friday, May 8 at 5:45pm – Q&A with Ben Proudfoot
Documentarian Chris Hesse captured the birth of African independence in the 1950s and ’60s on film as personal cinematographer to Kwame Nkrumah, the iconic African leader who helped lead Ghana to independence and served as its first president. Now 93 years old and facing impending blindness, Hesse and passionate young Ghanaian filmmaker Anita Afonu race against time to rescue and repatriate a secret trove of more than 1,000 films that were long thought to be destroyed by Nkrumah. Never seen by the public, these films may not only rewrite Ghanaian and African history, but world history itself. Ben Proudfoot, a two-time Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Short Film, crafts their inspirational journey into a stunning feature documentary. The Eyes of Ghana was executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama and won the Audience Award at the Hamptons International Film Festival.
Closing Night
Shorts Program 3: The Art of Protection
109m
Tuesday, May 12 at 8:00pm
This program includes Shiloh Tumo Washington’s Bailey’s Blues; Justice Rutikara’s Ibuka, Justice; Catherine E. McKinley, Mamadou Tapily, and Marc Lesser’s Keïta La; Aminata Drynie Bockarie’s Where the Water Meets Us; Nimco Sheikhaden’s Exodus; Klein Ongaki’s The Land Smiles Back; Abdelkrim Boughoud’s Eauquation – Water Distribution at Douiret-Sbâa; and Marwa Eltahir’s 99 Names: My Liberation Is Tied to Yours.
Bailey’s Blues
Shiloh Tumo Washington, 2025, U.S., 11m
English and French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
In 1960s France, a Chicago-born jazz bassist is pulled into an impromptu filmed interview during a festival. What begins as a routine exchange quickly shifts into a tense confrontation between subject and camera. Bailey’s Blues unfolds as an unfinished document, where jazz becomes a conduit for deeper truths about resistance and identity.
Ibuka, Justice
Justice Rutikara, 2024, Canada, 23m
French and Kinyarwanda with English subtitles
New York Premiere
During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Valentine and Jean-Claude risk everything to flee with their newborn, a journey captured in this poetic animated odyssey.
Keïta La
Catherine McKinley, Mamadou Tapily, Marc Lesser, 2025, U.S./Mali, 10m
English, French, and Bambara with English subtitles
Named after photographer Seydou Keïta’s family compound established in Bamako-Coura, Mali, in the early 1900s, on the edge of which stood his famous studio, Keïta La offers a glimpse into the world of Keïta’s artistry and his family’s efforts to steward and preserve his legacy.
Where the Water Meets Us
Aminata Drynie Bockarie, 2026, Sierra Leone, 10m
English, Mende, Krio, and Shebro with English subtitles
World Premiere
The film shines a light on the long and rich history of Bonthe, a town on Sherbro Island, and the island’s immense contribution to the formation of Sierra Leone. Beyond celebrating its heritage, the film addresses the ongoing challenges threatening the island’s survival—climate change, mangrove loss, and rising sea levels—while highlighting a new generation rising to find solutions and safeguard its future.
Exodus
Nimco Sheikhaden, 2025, U.S., 35m
English and Spanish with English subtitles
Exodus is a portrait of two women granted release after decades of incarceration, navigating the uncharted terrain of freedom and facing both its promise and its barriers in their efforts to build a dignified life.
The Land Smiles Back
Klein Ongaki, 2025, Kenya, 4m
Samburu with English subtitles
North American Premiere
For generations, the Samburu people and their livestock have had a deep connection with water, depending on the rains for their survival. The Land Smiles Back is the story of the Samburu community in Westgate Conservancy, who made the land “smile” again by returning to ancient hydrotechnology.
Eauquation – Water Distribution at Douiret-Sbâa
Abdelkrim Boughoud, 2023, Morocco, 5m
Darija and Amazigh with English subtitles
This documentary explores the ancient water system of Douiret-Sbâa, Morocco, a remarkable network fed by a local spring that has sustained the community for centuries. Highlighting the ingenuity of traditional hydro-technologies, the film examines how these systems continue to shape life in arid lands today.
99 Names: My Liberation Is Tied to Yours
Marwa Eltahir, 2025, Sudan/U.S., 11m
English and Arabic with English subtitles
New York Premiere
99 Names is an immersive, audio-visual story that combines sonic rituals of oral storytelling, recitation of the Quran, and calling on the 99 names of Allah to venerate the Divine. The film asks audiences to sit with the grief of colonization within the Afro-Arab diaspora and invites them to imagine how we can collectively hold, transmute and release this weight
Afrotōpia
David Mboussou, 2025, Gabon, 128m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Saturday, May 9 at 2:45pm – Q&A with David Mboussou
Ezekiel, a 25-year-old aspiring filmmaker, lives in the heart of the Congo Basin under the authority of his father, Maurice, a powerful businessman who opposes his artistic ambitions. When Ezekiel is forced to join the family logging business, he discovers that Maurice plans to exploit a sacred forest, the last refuge of an indigenous community. As he uncovers a buried colonial-era family secret, Ezekiel must choose between loyalty, personal freedom, and the fate of his people. Blending tradition and modernity to portray contemporary, cross-cultural Africa, Franco-Gabonese filmmaker David Mboussou’s “ecological manifesto” embraces the healing of historical wounds and explores the stigmatization of African cultures, the sacred link between people, nature, and spirit, and the resilience that shapes our future.
Barni
Mohammed Sheikh, 2024, Somalia/Djibouti/U.S., 90m
Somali with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Saturday, May 9 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Mohammed Sheikh
In a quaint Somali village where herding families coexist, an event disrupts the peace and 9-year-old Barni gets lost after a celebratory wedding, leaving the community in distress. Despite the exhaustive efforts of the village, Barni can’t be found, leaving her older sister Amina and her friends Hirsi and Geedi to set out on a journey to the city to locate her. Mohammed Sheikh’s directorial debut feature looks at the daily life and struggles faced by Somali communities, and its power lies in transforming a tragic disappearance into a celebration of courage, loyalty, and humanity.
4K Restoration
Cméra arabe
Férid Boughedir, 1987, Tunisia/France, 65m
Arabic and French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere of Restoration
Tuesday, May 12 at 5:45pm – Q&A with Férid Boughedir
Férid Boughedir’s Caméra arabe is a fast-paced documentary exploring the rise of politically engaged cinema in North Africa and the Middle East from the 1960s onward. Through film clips and filmmaker testimonies, it links this cinematic movement to major historical events like the Six-Day War and the Lebanon War, highlighting how directors grappled with questions of identity and expression. Featuring key voices such as Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina and Youssef Chahine, the film stands as a passionate tribute to a bold, independent wave of Arab cinema. Writing in Variety upon its 1987 release, Anthony Yung says “Chahine’s intelligent, anguished battle to describe Arabs’ shaken sense of their own identity in a world rocked by dramatic political events rather sums up the film.”
2K Restoration
Caméra d’Afrique
Férid Boughedir, 1983, Tunisia/France, 95m
English and French with English subtitles
Saturday, May 9 at 12:00pm – Extended conversation with Férid Boughedir
Seventy years after the invention of cinema—and after several decades of colonial cinema using Africa as an exotic setting, often denying humanity and dignity to its people—newly independent Africans finally took hold of the movie camera. Undeterred by the lack of means and infrastructure, they showed African reality in its variegated forms, seen at last through African eyes. Using extracts from significant films, interviews with filmmakers, and rare vintage footage, Caméra d’Afrique recalls the first 20 years of the new auteur cinema of sub-Saharan Africa, which bears witness to an indefatigable—and still-enduring—drive for self-expression. As a critic, historian, and filmmaker, director Férid Boughedir has played a central role in championing early African cinema, shaping how it has been preserved, studied, and understood across generations. 2K restoration from the original 16mm print done by the Laboratory of the CNC with the support of L’Institut français.
Followed by an extended conversation with Férid Boughedir and an audience-led Q&A, offering a rare opportunity to engage more deeply with Boughedir’s practice and legacy. As a key figure in this year’s festival, and as NYAFF’s honored pioneer, the expanded format creates space for reflection across his body of work. It highlights the enduring connections between sub-Saharan and North African cinemas, and revisits ongoing questions of authorship, memory, and self-representation that continue to resonate today. The conversation invites audiences into a thoughtful and sustained dialogue with one of the defining voices in the history of African cinema.
4K Restoration
En résidence surveillée
Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, 1981, Senegal, 102m
French and Wolof with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere of Restoration
The only feature-length fiction film by pioneering Senegalese filmmaker Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, whose seminal work Afrique sur Seine (1955) was the first film made entirely by Africans, En résidence surveillée unfolds in a fictional African state caught in the grip of political and economic turmoil. Through satire and keen observation, the film follows a society grappling with corrupt leadership, media controlled by the authorities, and the forced exile of political figures. A visionary filmmaker and incisive analyst of post-independence Africa, Vieyra captures the complexities and contradictions of governance and public life with striking clarity. Decades after its release, his children championed the restoration of this extraordinary political satire, bringing renewed attention to both the film and their father’s enduring legacy.
Preceded by:
N’Dobine
Ahmad Cissé, 2026, U.S., 6m
World Premiere
N’Dobine follows a traveler navigating his heart and past, guided by ritual and spirituality, as an unforeseen obstacle tests his journey of offering.
and
Vieyra, The Innovative Pioneer
Stéphane Soumanou Vieyra, 2025, France, 9m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Vieyra, The Innovative Pioneer imagines a virtual encounter between pioneering Senegalese filmmaker Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and his grandsons during a visit to a museum retracing his life, highlighting his childhood, his encounters, his studies, and his work.
Monday, May 11 at 8:15pm – Q&A with Ahmad Cissé and Stéphane Soumanou Vieyra
The Heart Is a Muscle
Imran Hamdulay, 2025, South Africa/Saudi Arabia, 86m
English and Afrikaans with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Monday, May 11 at 5:45pm – Q&A with Imran Hamdulay
At his son’s fifth birthday barbecue, Ryan panics when the boy suddenly goes missing. His violent reaction to the scare sets off a chain of events that exposes long-buried secrets from his past. As tensions rise among friends and old wounds resurface, Ryan is forced to confront who he has been and who he wants to become. A redemption story deeply infused with hip-hop culture, Imran Hamdulay’s debut feature won the Ecumenical Jury Prize at 2025 Berlinale Panorama and was South Africa’s official entry for Best International Feature at the 2026 Academy Awards. Hamdulay has been featured on CNN’s Inside Africa as one of “Africa’s directors to watch.”
Lace Relations
Anette Baldauf, Chioma Onyenwe, Joana Adesuwa Reiterer, Katharina Weingartner, 2025, Nigeria/Austria, 88m
German, English, and Yoruba with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Sunday, May 10 at 3:30pm – Q&A with Katharina Weingartner and film subject Ireti Bakare-Yusuf
Lace Relations uncovers the hidden histories of a global trade that connected Vorarlberg, Austria, to the bustling markets of Lagos, Nigeria. Through the intertwined lives of an Austrian lace exporter and a Nigerian market queen, this colorful, expansive documentary reveals how colonial legacies shaped a multimillion-dollar industry—enriching Europe while contributing to the collapse of West Africa’s indigenous textile economy. Combining on-location encounters and a powerful sociodramatic method, the film shifts the lens: Who tells the story? Who profits? Who remembers? Directed collectively by filmmakers from Austria and Nigeria, Lace Relations is not simply about textiles. It is about colonialism, memory, gendered resistance—and the patterns of power that continue to shape our world.
My Father and Qaddafi
Jihan, 2025, U.S./Libya, 88m
Arabic, English, and French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Thursday, May 7 at 5:30pm – Q&A with Jihan
When director Jihan was 6, her father, the Libyan opposition leader Mansur Rashid Kikhia, disappeared. Her first documentary, My Father and Qaddafi—which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and won the Jury Prize at the Marrakech International Film Festival—takes us on a raw and reflective journey as she sets out to piece together the life of a father she barely remembers. She retraces the 19-year journey of her mother, a strong-willed Syrian-American artist, encounters family members and her father’s peers, and revisits historical archive footage, along the way discovering the troubled history and politics of Libya. What begins as a mystery brings her closer to her father and her Libyan identity. “Making this documentary helps me understand the importance of a father figure and the impact of losing a father on a family, a community, and even a country,” Jihan has said.
Rumba Royale
Hamed Mobasser, Yohane Dean Lengol, 2025, Democratic Republic of the Congo/Belgium/France/U.S., 97m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Sunday, May 10 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Hamed Mobasser and Yohane Dean Lengol
In 1959 Léopoldville, the legendary Rumba Royale nightclub pulses with the rhythms of Congolese rumba in the final days of Belgian colonial rule. Daniel, a young photographer, captures the life of the club through his lens and grows close to Olive, an ambitious waitress with dreams beyond the dance floor. As personal ambitions, colonial hierarchies, and the city’s shifting political climate collide, the fragile world surrounding the nightclub begins to unravel. Congolese star Fally Ipupa, known as the “Prince of Rumba,” makes his big-screen debut in Hamed Mobasser and Yohane Dean Lengol’s captivating historical thriller.
So Long a Letter
Angèle Diabang, 2025, Senegal, 105m
French and Wolof with English subtitles
Friday, May 8 at 8:30pm – Q&A with Angèle Diabang
Ramatoulaye,a 50-year-old mother of seven children and headmistress of a primary school in Dakar, is shocked when her husband of 30 years decides to take a second wife—a 20-year-old. In a quest for freedom that leads to rebellion, she must find a balance between the Western ways she values and the traditions she respects. An adaptation of the seminal 1979 novel by Senegalese writer Mariama Bâ, widely regarded as one of the first feminist literary works of modern Africa, Angèle Diabang’s feature debut illustrates very different views of women’s roles in contemporary African society.
The Soul of Africa
Gabriel Souleyka, 2025, France/U.S./Togo, 67m
English and French with English subtitles
World Premiere
Sunday, May 10 at 12:45pm
The first feature documentary by author and African historian Gabriel Souleyka delves into the heart of African spirituality, exploring its deep roots and its evolution across centuries, exploring a fundamental question: What were the spiritual beliefs and practices of African peoples before the arrival of Christianity and Islam on the Continent? It features captivating images and moving testimonies at the 10th Festival of Black Divinities, held in Togo in 2025, a cultural and spiritual event that celebrates ancestral traditions and African deities—its rituals, dances, songs, and ceremonies serve as a thread to explore the wealth of pre-colonial African spiritualities. Through expert interviews, immersive festival sequences, and philosophical reflections, The Soul of Africa highlights the resilience of spiritual tradition despite outside influences and examines its place in contemporary Africa, offering a vibrant journey into the heart of a continent where the sacred and the profane blend harmoniously. It is both a tribute to ancestral spiritualities and an invitation to discover Africa’s cultural foundations while questioning their future in a rapidly changing world.
When Nigeria Happens
Ema Edosio Deelen, 2025, Belgium/Nigeria, 119m
English and Pidgin with English subtitles
New York Premiere
A bold, visually striking contemporary dance drama that had its world premiere at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival, When Nigeria Happens is a gripping story that follows a group of misfit dancers—Fagbo, Pokko, Lighter, Movement, Colos, and Poppy—who live for their art while defying societal expectations. Their tight-knit world is upended when Fagbo’s mother falls critically ill, leaving him in a desperate search for funds. As pressures mount, their bond and dreams are tested like never before. Amid increasing sacrifices, they must confront what it truly means to fight for love, identity, and a future in Nigeria.
Preceded by:
Akosua
Christian Saint, Mélissa Rouillé, 2023, Ghana, 7m
Twi with English subtitles
North American Premiere
In Kumasi, five lifelong friends known as “the Aunties” gather for a day of shared rituals shaped by decades of sisterhood. Through moments of dance, laughter, and prayer, their individual stories come together as one. Akosua is an intimate portrait of friendship, tradition, and the strength found in community.
Saturday, May 9 at 8:30pm – Q&A with Ema Edosio Deelen
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