Lagos Is the Only African City Going to Cannes This Year

For the first time, Lagos will represent the entire African continent at one of the world's most powerful film markets.

As the 79th Cannes Film Festival approaches, Lagos has been selected as the only African partner city for the Goes to Cannes 2026 program, with the Africa International Film Festival (AFRIFF) serving as the continent's sole curator.

Running from May 12th to 20th at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès in Cannes, France, the program will place an arranged slate of Nigerian and African works-in-progress directly in front of the world's most influential distributors, sales agents, and festival programmers. Lagos joins Hong Kong, Tokyo, Italy, and Japan as this year's partner cities.

‘Goes to Cannes’ is not an honorary acknowledgement. It is a working program built inside the Marché du Film, the Cannes Film Market, one of the largest film markets in the world. Established in 1959, the Marché draws more than 12,500 industry professionals each year, with around 4,000 films and projects generating deals worth between $600 million and $1 billion in total turnover.

Within that market, Goes to Cannes gives film festivals from around the world an exclusive window to curate and pitch their own slate of films in post-production. Selected filmmakers get a direct audience with the buyers, financiers, and programmers who can attach deals, sales agents, and festival slots to their projects before the films are even finished.

That arrangement responsibility falls entirely on AFRIFF. As the participating partner, the festival will select between five and seven Nigerian and African titles to represent the continent, and will be allocated two hours during the market to pitch each project to investors, sales agents, and distributors. For each selected film, the filmmaker will present a ten-to-fifteen-minute extended teaser, enough to demonstrate quality and tone, followed by a live pitch laying out what is needed to complete the project.

The selection criteria are clear: films must be in post-production, must not have screened at any international festival, and must not have been released online. Across a slate of five to seven titles, AFRIFF will also be expected to balance genre (one thriller, one social drama, one documentary, one animation, perhaps a historical epic) to present the full range of what African cinema can do, not a single note.

This invitation does not arrive in a vacuum. In May 2025, AFRIFF founder Chioma Ude signed a landmark Memorandum of Understanding with the Nigerian Ministry of Art, Culture, and the Creative Economy at Cannes itself, a deal that led directly to the creation of the AFRIFF Film and Content Market. This year's Goes to Cannes participation is, in many ways, the next chapter of that agreement, and a signal that Nigeria's creative economy is being taken seriously as a vehicle for international engagement.

As of writing, AFRIFF has yet to announce its submission and selection process details.

For individual filmmakers, the opportunity is concrete. It offers a sales agent, a co-production deal, or a festival premiere slot secured before the film wraps. But the broader significance goes beyond a single project.

For years, Nigerian and African filmmakers have been navigating global markets largely on their own, with individual filmmakers purchasing their own market access and making their own connections. What 'Goes to Cannes' represents is something structurally different. The Nigerian ecosystem is being recognised and platformed as a collective, with AFRIFF acting as the institutional bridge between local talent and the global box office.

Lagos joining cities like Hong Kong and Tokyo as a Goes to Cannes partner is a cultural milestone. It positions Lagos as a film city in the truest industry sense, one that attracts co-production interest, foreign investment, and technical partnerships. The kind of visibility Cannes generates has a well-documented ripple effect, and this year, that ripple starts in Lagos.

The full Official Selection for Cannes 2026 has yet to be announced.

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