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 programme invites a wider Cape Town audience to experience films that build on the continent’s cinematic canon.
The sixth film that we will be screening as part of the Pan-African Film Caravan is titled In the Year of the Quiet Sun by the Otolith Group. This video essay takes its name from the solar phenomenon that occurs every eleven years, when the sun’s surface cools enough to allow observatories to study solar activity. From November 1964 to November 1965, countries across the world, including many newly independent African states, issued stamps to commemorate the first scientific expedition to study the surface of the sun. As these stamps turned their faces towards the sun, they overlooked the instability on the ground: the military coups planned by soldiers against the governments of Nigeria and Ghana; the popular and murderous uprisings in Zanzibar; and the crisis of sovereignty in the Congo, instigated by the Force Publique, sustained by Union Minière du Haut-Katanga and worsened by the intervention of the United Nations.
In this work, the astronomical time of the quiet sun converges with the political calendar of conferences that took place in cities such as Bandung, Cairo, Belgrade, Accra, Addis Ababa, Saniquelle and Casablanca throughout the 1950s and 1960s, when politicians, activists and journalists gathered to debate and plan the continental programme of Pan-Africanist policy. In the Year of the Quiet Sun proceeds through scenes that allude, often indirectly, to the making and unmaking of polity on a continental scale. It focuses upon magnified details of postage stamps, generating a digital monumentality that pays attention to the anonymous verdict of inadvertent iconoclasm visited upon the political ceremony of Independence by an unattributable postal history. To complement In the Year of the Quiet Sun, the Otolith Collective has curated films and videos that dramatise the contingency of anti-colonial struggles through forms of travelogue and children’s drawing, as well as through modes of clandestinity and translation.
Screenings take place at the Labia Theatre every last Friday of the month from 6 pm–8 pm, May though November 2026. A communal conversation follows 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.
To date, the films screened in this satellite programme included: Stories of Our Lives (2014) by the East-African Nest Collective; Ancestral Visions of the Future (2025) by Lesotho-born, Germany-based artist Jeremiah Lemohang Mosese; About Some Meaningless Events (1974) by Mostafa Derkaoui; One Take Grace (2021); and Difret (2014) by Zeresenay Berhane Mehari.
Location
The Labia Theatre
Directions
Date & Time
Friday, 25 September 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 In the Year of the Quiet Sun, courtesy of the Otolith Group.
Turning Towards the Sun: Pan-African Film Caravan is presented in collaboration with the African Film and Media Arts Collective (AFMAC) and BMW.
