In anticipation of the moving image exhibition Turning Towards the Sun, hosted in collaboration with the African Film and Media Arts Collective (AFMAC) and BMW, Zeitz MOCAA presents the Pan-African Film Caravan. The programme highlights a range of historical and contemporary African cinematic approaches, from historical drama, new wave to surrealism, science fiction, and docu-fiction. The selection of films feature everyday narratives of queer African life, the human condition, and cultural reclamation. Turning Towards the Sun: Pan-African Film Caravan foregrounds voices from Africa and its diaspora, moving from a singular perspective to a multivocal one. In honouring the Pan-African tradition, the program invites a wider Cape Town audience to experience films that build on the continent’s cinematic canon.
Screenings take place at the Labia Theatre every last Friday of the month from 18:00 – 20:00, starting 27 April 2026 and ending 30 October 2026. A communal conversation will follow each screening led by the Zeitz MOCAA curatorial team. Screenings cost a nominal fee of R30 to be donated to the BMW Centre For Art Education. We began this satellite programme with the film Stories of Our Lives (2014) by the East-African Nest Collective, followed by Ancestral Visions of the Future (2025) by Lesotho-born, Germany-based artist Jeremiah Lemohang Mosese.
For our third film in the Pan-African Film Caravan screening programme, we will be showing About Some Meaningless Events (1974), directed by Mostafa Derkaoui. Derkaoui stages a restless inquiry into the social function of cinema at a pivotal moment in postcolonial Morocco. Beginning as a documentary, the film follows a group of filmmakers through the streets, cafés, and bars of Casablanca as they ask ordinary citizens what they expect from a national cinema still struggling to define itself. Their conversations reveal a widespread desire for films that move beyond escapism and intellectual abstraction to engage directly with the realities of everyday life. As the filmmakers’ search for a subject unfolds, the documentary gradually gives way to fiction when an accidental killing by a disgruntled worker redirects their investigation. Derkaoui exploits this shift to blur the boundaries between reality and performance, transforming the film into a layered meditation on class, labour, masculinity, language, political consciousness, and the possibilities of cultural production. Constantly foregrounding its own construction, About Some Meaningless Events turns the camera back on itself, questioning not only what cinema is, but whom it serves. Banned by the Moroccan state after a single screening in Paris in 1975 and presumed lost for over four decades, the film was rediscovered in 2016 and restored by Lea Morin in collaboration with the director. Today, it stands as a vital and self-reflexive work of Third Cinema: an unfinished conversation about representation, power, and the enduring struggle to create a cinema capable of speaking with, rather than merely about, the people.
Location
The Labia Theatre
Directions
Date & Time
Friday, 26 June 2026 | 6 pm – 8 pm
Entry
Non-members pay R30 per person
Zeitz MOCAA Members enter free with presentation of valid membership.
Not yet a member? Reach out to our friendly team at the front desk or email membership@zeitzmocaa.museum to explore Zeitz MOCAA Membership
Thank You for Supporting our Mission!
Your film screening fee is fully reinvested into the programming of the BMW Centre for Art Education, enabling children from under-resourced communities to access and participate in our holiday and community programmes, tours, and workshops.
Inspired by cultural events such as the Pan-African Film Festival (FESPACO) (1969) and The Poetry Caravan (2000) which travelled from Dakar to Timbuktu, this film program recognizes filmmaking as an important, yet largely distant tradition used during the wave of 1960s African independence. In convening these films, Turning Towards the Sun: Pan African Film Caravan promotes filmmaking as a historical and contemporary tool for visual and cinematic agency.
Screenings include films from East Africa with Jim Chuchu, Zeresenay Mehari Berhane, and Wanuri Kahiu. Their films offer a feminist, queer, and futurist perspective of the African continent. Films from West Africa invite us to meet one of the pioneers of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene with his film, Xala (1975), which he developed from his novel of the same title. Mati Diop will guide us to Benin to debate the possibilities of repatriation and return. In North Africa we go into the streets of Casablanca to understand Moroccans’ understanding of cinema with Mostafa Derkaoui. We make a crossing to the Black Atlantic to commune with The Otolith Group, and we take a sho’t left to Southern Africa with Lemohang Mosese’s Ancestral Visions of the Future (2025).
The African Film and Media Arts Collective (AFMAC) is a continent-spanning cohort of artists and makers imagining new conditions of creation. Developed by Julie Mehretu – with support of BMW and originally envisioned within the context of the artist’s Art Car #20 project – together with writer and producer Mehret Mandefro, AFMAC’s goal is to create sustainable infrastructures and strengthen the artistic community in Africa.
The BMW Group has championed cultural engagement for over half a century, supporting hundreds of cultural initiatives worldwide across art, music, film, and design. Creative freedom lies at the core of its manifold collaborations. As an early partner of Zeitz MOCAA, BMW has helped advance the museum’s vision—from initial commissions in the BMW Atrium to today’s BMW Centre for Art Education.
Image credit: Image still from the second screening in the series which took place Friday, 29 May 2026, Ancestral Visions of the Future. Courtesy of the artist, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese.
