Locarno Open Doors 2026: Next Gen African Tales of Miraculous Snowfalls, Lost Dreams, an African Keyboard Prodigy and New Heroes
Locarno Film Festival's Open Doors programme returns for its second year focused on African cinema, running on-site from 5-10 August 2026 and showcasing emerging directors and producers alongside recent festival hits. The initiative, curated by Suzsi Bankuti, offers a snapshot of the continent's upscale film scene, with organisers highlighting a strong presence of female film-makers among the producers, directors and new Open Doors Connect participants featured this year.
Standout projects include Ique Langa's magical-realist love story "Chapa 100", set in Maputo, and Talemwa Pius's feature debut "A Vineyard for a Lobster", which opens with an impossible snowfall over a drought-stricken Ugandan village. Also featured are Suzannah Mirghani's "Cotton Queen", the first Sudanese fiction feature written and directed by a woman, which premiered at Venice Critics' Week; the Tribeca and Sheffield DocFest-winning documentary "Crocodile"; TIFF Centerpiece title "Diya"; and Aymar Esse's "My Father's Kora", which receives its world premiere at Locarno. Nigerian producer David Ikeata of Vox Cinematic Films is bringing five projects to market, including the queer drama "Hibiscus by the River".
- Locarno's Open Doors 2026 spotlights African film talent, 5-10 August.
- Featured projects span Mozambique, Uganda, Sudan and Nigeria.
- Women film-makers dominate this year's producer and director selections.
New here? Start with this
Locarno is one of the world's longest-running film festivals, held each August in a lakeside Swiss town, and it is known for spotting new directors before they become well known elsewhere. Open Doors is a strand of the festival, now in its second year with a focus on Africa, designed to introduce industry buyers and audiences to film-makers and producers from the continent who do not yet have wide international recognition. It runs alongside the main festival, this year from 5 to 10 August 2026.
The programme works by bringing together a curated group of directors, producers and their projects, ranging from finished films that have already shown at other festivals to works still in development, so that they can find funding, distributors or wider audiences. This year's selection includes feature films, documentaries and a strong number of projects led by women, covering countries such as Mozambique, Uganda, Sudan and Nigeria among others.
The wider significance is that African cinema has struggled for years to get sustained attention and funding from the international festival and distribution circuit, despite producing acclaimed work. Programmes like Open Doors matter because they act as a bridge, giving these film-makers a platform at a major European festival that can shape which stories from the continent reach global screens.