Africa’s Stories.
Wales’s Screen.
The Festival
Africa is not one story.
It’s thousands of languages, cities, traditions and imaginations — and for three days this September, Cardiff becomes the place where those stories meet an audience ready to see them.
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.
Featured Films
Feature, short, animation, documentary, experimental.
Omen
Baloji · Belgium/DR Congo · 2023. Time ·16:50
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. Time 11:30
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 FESTIVAL TRAILER
Watch the official Watch Africa Film Festival trailer and step inside nine days of premieres, conversations and Cape Town cinema.
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.
THE POCKET 🎬
When the night is over, a rhythm remains. Written and directed by @rosemary.adjoa.dery , The Pocket brings a drummer, a singer and an unexpected presence together through music in the quiet aftermath of an evening. For a moment, they find the pocket, that rare space where rhythm, voice and movement fall perfectly into place.
But every rhythm carries a history.
As the music shifts, so does the space between them. The Pocket explores identity, creativity and the fragile line between inspiration and appropriation, asking what happens when a shared artistic language is reinterpreted and pulled away from its origins.
Screening as part of Diaspora in Wales, our collection of short films by African diaspora filmmakers based in Wales.
📅 Sunday 13 September
⏰ 11:50am
📍 Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff
🎟 Pay What You Can
Walk-in available
Express Your Africa.
Watch Africa Film Festival 2026 starts TODAY.
Three days of African cinema, stories, workshops, music, conversation, creativity and community take over Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff from 11–13 September.
We open tonight with My Father’s Shadow, followed by a panel discussion with Reel Futures, Femi and Emmanuel Bajulaye, before we move into AKWAABA, our official launch party with DJ Samandollar.
Then across Saturday and Sunday, there’s a full weekend of feature films, WAFF finalists, Welsh premieres, animation, workshops, Mansa Market, live performance and our 2026 Awards Ceremony.
Whether you’ve already got your tickets or you’re only just discovering us, there’s still time to join us.
📍 Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff
📅 11–13 September 2026
🎟 Tickets available now via Chapter + selected workshops/screenings via Eventbrite
Africa’s stories through Welsh screens.
EXPRESS YOUR AFRICA.
ATLANTICS 🎬
A love story haunted by everything that has been left behind.
On the outskirts of Dakar, a group of young construction workers have gone months without pay. With little hope of a future, they leave Senegal by sea. Among them is Souleiman, the lover of Ada, who has been promised to another man.
But after they disappear across the Atlantic, something strange begins to happen back home.
Directed by Mati Diop, Atlantics moves between romance, migration, grief and the supernatural, turning a story of young people searching for a better future into something haunting and unexpected.
Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, the film also became the first film directed by a Black woman to compete for the Palme d’Or.
📅 Saturday 12 September
⏰ 8:35pm
📍 Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff
🔞 15 | 104 mins
🎟 Tickets via Chapter
THE BANJO BOYS 🎬 | WELSH PREMIERE
From Malawi to stages around the world.
The Banjo Boys follows the extraordinary journey of Madalitso Band, whose homemade instruments, infectious performances and unmistakable sound have taken them from playing on the streets of Malawi to international audiences.
Directed by @johanrnayar, the documentary is a story of music, friendship and creativity, and what can happen when something deeply local travels far beyond where it began.
We’re excited to bring The Banjo Boys to Wales for its Welsh Premiere, where it is also a Watch Africa Film Festival 2026 Documentary Finalist.
And the conversation continues after with Q&A with director Johan Nayar, hosted by Tim TysonShor.
📅 Sunday 13 September
⏰ 4:00pm
📍 Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff
🎬 PG | 76 mins + Director Q&A
🎟 Tickets via Chapter
Come for the film, stay for the story behind it.
Express Your Africa.
BLUE BURNING 🎬
What happens when the search for oil and gas threatens the places people call home?
Blue Burning follows South Africa’s grassroots resistance to offshore oil and gas exploration, documenting one of the country’s largest environmental campaigns.
From coastal communities to activists and organisations fighting to protect the ocean, the documentary explores what is at stake when environmental protection, livelihoods and powerful commercial interests collide.
Blue Burning is a finalist in the Watch Africa Film Festival 2026 Documentary category.
📅 Saturday 12 September
⏰ 6:40pm
📍 Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff
🎬 PG | 90 mins
OMEN 🎬 What happens when the world decides who you are before you’ve had the chance to define yourself?
Omen follows four people accused of witchcraft and sorcery, each navigating the weight of identities, beliefs and expectations imposed upon them.
Moving through a surreal and magical vision of Africa, the film explores family, tradition, otherness and what it takes to break free from the labels placed upon us.
Directed by @baloji , Omen is a visually striking journey where reality, mythology and magic bleed into one another.
📅 Saturday 12 September
⏰ 4:50pm
📍 Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff
🔞 15 | 90 mins
Part of Watch Africa Film Festival 2026
11–13 September
Express Your Africa.
ÀJỌ̀KẸ́ 🎬
What happens when an industry tells you that who you are isn’t enough?
Àjọ̀kẹ́ is an autobiographical short film following a Nigerian model in the UK whose confidence is shaken when a powerful fashion agent rejects her body, beauty and identity.
Forced into a symbolic box of limitation, Àjọ̀kẹ́ confronts what it means to be reduced and misjudged. Through ancestral praise, ritualistic movement and self-remembrance, she begins to reclaim her beauty, power and identity on her own terms.
Screening as part of Diaspora in Wales, a collection of short films by African diaspora filmmakers based in Wales, telling stories of identity, migration, belonging, family and community.
📅 Sunday 13 September
⏰ 11:50am
📍 Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff
🎟 Pay What You Can
Express Your Africa.
MY FATHER’S SHADOW 🎬
We open Watch Africa Film Festival 2026 with My Father’s Shadow, the debut feature from Nigerian-British filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr.
Set against the political unrest surrounding Nigeria’s 1993 presidential election, two young brothers ( @studio_bajulaye ) spend a day travelling through Lagos with their estranged father. What begins as a journey through the city becomes something much more intimate, revealing a father through the eyes of his sons.
Following the film, we’ll open up the conversation with Reel Futures and brothers Femi and Emmanuel Bajulaye, co-directors and stars of Ekun Omi: Tears of Desert Water and SOIL, exploring fatherhood, brotherhood, memory and the importance of telling Nigerian stories with authenticity.
And then we’re not going home. 👀
We head straight into AKWAABA, our festival launch party, with a DJ set from @samandollar welcome drinks and the official start of the WAFF weekend.
🎬 My Father’s Shadow + Panel Discussion
📅 Friday 11 September
⏰ 6:00pm
📍 Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff
🔞 15
🎶 AKWAABA Launch Party from 8:15pm
Open entry
Three days of African cinema, conversation, music, workshops and community begin here.
Express Your Africa.
