Africa’s Stories.
Wales’s Screen.
Africa is not one story.
13
Years of festival
168
Films screened
10,000+
Viewers
1
Wales’s only African film festival
My Father’s Shadow
Akinola Davis · Nigeria-UK · 2025 · 93 min
Two young brothers explore Lagos with their estranged father during the 1993 Nigerian election crisis — witnessing both the city’s magnitude and their father’s own reckoning.
The screening opens the festival at 18:10, following welcome remarks from festival producer Rosemary Adjoa Dery, and is followed by the Akwaaba Launch Party with a DJ set from Samandaal on the Concourse.
Three days. Films, workshops, music, market.
13:30
African Storytelling Workshop
Saturday · Cinema Foyer · With Bevin Magama
Discover the art of African storytelling through guided exercises, creative prompts and shared experiences. Open to all backgrounds and experience levels.
15:00
African Dance Workshop
Saturday · Dance Studio · With Idrissa Camara
West African dance traditions meet contemporary performance practice. Live rhythms, a welcoming room, and movement as a form of expression and community.
10:00–18:00
Mansa Market
Saturday & Sunday · Concourse
Inspired by Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage and the cultural exchange it created. Food, craft, textiles and traders across the full festival weekend.
Feature, short, animation, documentary, experimental.
Omen
Baloji · Belgium/DR Congo · 2023 · 90 min
Four people considered witches and sorcerers find a way to help each other escape their fate, in a phantasmagorical Africa.
Liyana
Eswatini · Family/PG · Saturday 11:40
Five children in the Kingdom of Eswatini turn past traumas into the tale of a Swazi girl who sets out to save her twin brothers.
The people bringing these stories to the screen.
Bevin Magama
Facilitator, African Storytelling Workshop · Saturday, Cinema Foyer
Discover the art of African storytelling with Bevin Magama in this engaging, interactive workshop at the Watch-Africa Film Festival. Through guided exercises, creative prompts, and shared experiences, participants will explore how stories connect us, preserve culture, and inspire change. Drawing on African storytelling traditions alongside contemporary approaches, Bevin will help participants develop their voice, build confidence, and craft compelling narratives.
LAKU NEG
Meet Adéọlá
An artist-researcher living in Wales since 2003. I am interested in carnival, masquerade and ritual and the ways in which we perform our fragments – the ways we express identity and belonging in the diaspora – through memory, re-imagination and the making of sacred spaces.
Samandaal
DJ, Akwaaba Launch Party
Friday night on the Concourse. Samandaal opens the festival weekend with a set spanning the continent and its diaspora.
More than a film festival. A gathering.
Live music, dance and celebration
From the Akwaaba Launch Party to the closing TUZO Party, the weekend is built around gathering. In Swahili, tuzo means award or reward — so we celebrate success and culture together.
Short Snacks and conversation
After a curated selection of films, enjoy a range of African snacks and discuss what you’ve just watched. We know good conversation happens over good food.
Since 2013, in Cardiff.
Opening nights
Thirteen editions of queues around the block, first-time visitors and returning regulars.
Filmmaker Q&As
Directors, producers and performers in the room, answering the questions the film just raised.
Community screenings
Beyond the cinema — pavilions, gardens and partner venues across the city.
Year-Round Screenings
The festival doesn’t end in September.
Watch Africa runs a year-round monthly screenings programme, bringing African cinema to Cardiff audiences between festival editions — at Chapter Arts Centre, Grange Pavilion, and partner venues across the city.
One film. One evening. A room full of people who came to watch, talk, and stay a while after the credits roll.
WAFF Club
Closer to everything we do.
Our year-round community for people who don’t want to wait until September to be part of Watch Africa.
Free to join. Discounted monthly screenings, networking with filmmakers and industry, a hand in shaping the festival, and an official WAFF Club tee for every member.
Building stronger cultural connections between Wales and Africa.
Stay in the loop
Guest announcements, ticket launches and monthly screenings — first.
Express Your Africa.
11–13 September 2026 · Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff. Whether you’re discovering African cinema for the first time or reconnecting with stories that feel like home — there’s a place for you here.
Watch Africa in the Moment
Follow Watch Africa Film Festival on Instagram for the latest festival news, films, conversations and community moments.
African Dance workshop with Idrissa Camara is not to be missed! Get your whole body moving, be ready to express your self! Tickets are available on Our website or Eventbrite. 💃🏾
The best of African animation, all in one sitting.
A curated selection from CTIAF 2025, made with @cardiffanimation and @CTIAF, showing the range of what African animation is doing right now, playful, inventive, and genuinely built for every age in the room.
Followed by a recorded Q&A with two of the directors behind the work.
Family friendly, age PG. Bring the kids, bring yourself, bring whoever needs an afternoon of something joyful.
Sunday 13 September, 17:25, Chapter Arts Centre. Link in bio.
2093. A war has resurrected ancient kingdoms. A filmmaker sets out to document it, and runs straight into an actress who wants nothing to do with him, or the AI shaping how his story gets told. Memory of Princess Mubi is sci-fi with the mockumentary’s straight face, strange, sharp, and asking questions that feel a lot closer to now than 2093 suggests.
@memoryofprincessmumbi
Sunday 13 September, Chapter Arts Centre. Link in bio.
Three days. One festival. Here’s how it breaks down.
Friday we open with My Father’s Shadow, then straight into Akwaaba Launch party.
Saturday’s the big one family films, workshops, Atlantics, Liyana. Sunday we close with Black Girl, Memory of Princess Mubi, and the WAFF Awards.
We’ll walk through each day properly over the next few weeks.
For now - save this one, you’ll want it.
Full programme + tickets, link in bio.
WATCH A STORY. FUND THE NEXT ONE. 🎬
For Diaspora in Wales, we wanted the screening to be accessible while also thinking about what happens after the credits roll.
Want to come along?
Tickets are Pay What You Can. Choose what works for you.
Want to support what comes next?
Fund the Next Story is an optional donation that goes towards supporting future films by diaspora filmmakers in Wales and future Diaspora in Wales screenings.
It isn’t an entry ticket, so if you’re coming to the screening, make sure you book a standard Pay What You Can ticket too.
Every story we’re screening started because somebody believed it was worth making.
We’re creating a way for audiences to help that continue.
Come watch. And if you can, help fund what’s next.
📍 Chapter, Cardiff
📅 Sunday 13 September · 12:25pm
🎞️ Watch Africa Film Festival
South Africa’s coastline, and the fight to keep it that way.
Blue Burning documents one of the country’s largest grassroots environmental campaigns, communities standing against offshore oil and gas exploration, refusing to let their waters be signed away.
A finalist for WAFF 2026’s Documentary category, and a reminder that some of the most urgent African stories right now are being told about the land itself.
Saturday 12 September, 19:10, Chapter Arts Centre. Link in bio.
Watch Africa Film Festival 2026’s short film finalists take the screen Saturday morning , a powerful man waking in Luanda with no memory of the power he once held, a young woman finding her courage mid-haircut and a Madagascan woman starting over in La Réunion, hoping it sticks.
Saturday 12 September, 10:00, Chapter Arts Centre. Link in bio.
Hana returns to Luxor, and the past comes with her.
A British aid worker, back in Egypt after years on the frontline of crisis work, runs into an old lover, an archaeologist still living among the ruins of what was. What follows is quiet, aching, unresolved, a woman trying to reconcile who she was here with who she’s become.
A Sundance selection, and one of the most understated love stories you’ll see this year.
Saturday 12 September, 13:10, Chapter Arts Centre. Link in bio.
