Nuisance Bear, winner of the Sundance 2026 Grand Jury PrizeVariety recently named five early contenders for Best Documentary at next year’s Oscars. This includes two that will have their African premieres at Encounters South African International Documentary Festival in June 2026:

• TUTU, winner of the 2026 Berlin Peace Film Prize, about the Nobel Peace Prize-winning rebel cleric

• Nuisance Bear, winner of the 2026 Sundance Grand Jury Prize, about a polar bear encroaching on human settlements as its Arctic habitat disappears

Africa’s leading documentary festival, Encounters returns for its 28th edition between 4-14 June 2026, with screenings, masterclasses, panels and Q&As in both Cape Town and Johannesburg.

“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.”

Opening film: Truck Mama

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.”

World premieres of South African documentaries

Encounters will host the world premieres of four documentary features from South Africa:

• Notes from the Underground, a music documentary tracing the history of Cape hip hop, from co-directors Adrian Van Wyk and Chris Kets

• Mmabatho Montsho’s Marxism & Period Pains, which unpacks the impact of period pains on girls and women “as an oppressed class negotiating a capitalist reality”
• Pat van Heerden and Edwin Wes’ The Hour After Midnight, investigating the death in detention of trade unionist Dr Neil Aggett during Apartheid

• Elan Gamaker’s My Father’s Son, in which the Jewish director meets his Black brother from another mother for the first time over Zoom

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:

• Elon Musk Unveiled – The Tesla Experiment, a critical look at the rise of Elon Musk, Tesla, and safety concerns about their self-driving cars

• 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

• 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 film 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.

Encounters is supported by the Bertha Foundation, National Film and Video Foundation of South Africa, City of Cape Town, Film Cape Town, Netflix, Consulate General of Portugal in Johannesburg, SWISS Films, Consulate General of Switzerland in Cape Town, German Films, German Documentaries, DOK.fest München, French Institute of South Africa, Lesotho and Malawi, Central Film School, Ster-Kinekor, Clinix, The Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, Rough Cut Lab Africa, South African Guild of Editors, University of Cape Town (UCT), UCT Center for Film and Media Services, Durban FilmMart Institute, filmmart.africa, Documentary Filmmakers Association of South Africa, University of the Western Cape (UWC), Centre for Humanities Research (CHR), Goethe Institut Johannesburg, Kamva Collective, Modern Times Review, and Politically Aweh.