African Cinema’s Surge Shows 3 Films Chase the Golden Bear at Berlinale 2026

The Berlin International Film Festival has long positioned itself as one of the most politically engaged and artistically curious events on the global festival circuit. For its 76th edition, the Berlinale continues that tradition, and African cinema is once again part of the conversation. Across Competition, Panorama, Forum, and Shorts, filmmakers from the continent are showing work that spans intimate family drama, experimental documentary, queer coming-of-age stories, and myth-inflected storytelling.

This year’s selections are not token inclusions. African filmmakers are present in the festival’s most prestigious sections, including the Golden Bear competition, reinforcing the idea that African cinema is no longer orbiting the global festival space but firmly shaping it.

Three African films among 22 are competing for the Berlinale’s top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, which runs from February 12 to 22, 2026: À voix basse by Tunisian director Leyla Bouzid, Dao by Franco-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis, and Soumsoum, la nuit des astres by Chadian auteur Mahamat-Saleh Haroun.

Bouzid first drew international attention with As I Open My Eyes, Gomis is a Berlinale veteran who won the Grand Jury Prize for Félicité in 2017, and Haroun, long regarded as one of Africa’s most significant filmmakers, won the Jury Prize at Cannes for A Screaming Man. Their presence shows how firmly African cinema now sits within the festival’s most prestigious tier, especially following Mati Diop’s historic Golden Bear win for Dahomey in 2024.

Bouzid’s À voix basse is a restrained family drama that unfolds around a woman returning to Tunisia for her uncle’s funeral, only to confront buried tensions, personal secrets, and unanswered questions about her past. Dao takes a more fluid, experimental approach, blurring casting, performance, and narrative as it traces a diasporic family split between Paris and Guinea-Bissau.

In Soumsoum, la nuit des astres, Haroun turns to mysticism, following a teenage girl chosen to inherit a fragile spiritual world as its ageing guardian prepares for death. Together, the films reflect three distinct but equally assured approaches to storytelling within the competition.

Outside Competition, African films are spread across several sections, reinforcing the breadth of voices present at Berlinale 2026.

In the Perspectives section, Chronicles from the Siege, directed by Abdallah Alkhatib, offers a fragmented, non-linear portrait shaped by lived experience rather than conventional storytelling. The film resists a single protagonist, instead focusing on collective endurance and survival.

The Generation 14plus section features Black Burns Fast by South African director Sandulela Asanda. The film follows Luthando, a scholarship student at a conservative all-girls boarding school, whose quiet life is disrupted by a new student, Ayanda. Their secret romance becomes both liberating and dangerous, forcing Luthando to confront institutional pressure, class dynamics, and her own sense of identity. 

Short-form storytelling is also well represented. Les âmes du Fouta by Alpha Diallo reimagines Antigone within a Fulani village in northern Senegal, where a grieving mother challenges tradition to give her son a dignified burial. Taxi-Moto by Gaël Kamilindi blends fiction and conversation, reconstructing a censored queer love story through dialogue and shared imagination.

Nigeria’s most prominent presence at Berlinale 2026 comes through Olive Nwosu’s debut feature Lady, selected for the Panorama section. It is currently the only Nigerian narrative feature announced in the lineup. The film premiered earlier this year at Sundance, where it won the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Creative Vision.

Nigerian involvement also extends beyond narrative cinema. Crocodile, a documentary co-directed by Nigerian collective The Critics Company and New Zealand filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly, will premiere in the Forum section. The film documents a group of Nigerian teenagers who use improvised tools and sheer imagination to create handmade sci-fi films within their village. Part coming-of-age story, part meditation on creative resistance, Crocodile captures cinema as play, survival, and political expression.

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Also screening in Forum Expanded is Karimah Ashadu’s short documentary Muscle. Shot almost entirely in close-up, the film observes bodybuilders in Lagos, focusing on texture, movement, sound, and ritual rather than linear narrative. Ashadu’s camera lingers on skin, breath, and exertion, inviting reflection on visibility, labour, and the Black male body without fixing it into stereotype or spectacle.

Similarly, Dika Ofoma has been selected for the Berlinale Talents programme as a screenwriter and director. Ofoma, known for short films such as Obi Is a Boy, will be joined by Ghanaian film critic and journalist Alice Johnson, who has also been selected for the programme. 

For years, the global film circuit treated African cinema as a special interest niche, often hidden away in late-night experimental slots. But with four features in the Main Competition and Nigerians like The Critics Company leading the charge in the Forum, the narrative has fundamentally changed.

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