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.
Our next film in the Pan-African Film Caravan screening programme is titled One Take Grace (2021), a collaboration between artist, Lindiwe Matshikiza (39), and actor and community leader, Mothiba Grace Bapela (58) which began with the two women meeting as actors on a local film set in 2010. In this eclectic cinematic portrait of Bapela, she reflects on her extraordinary life, and searches for a way to break out of the societal roles cast for her. Bapela recounts and performs some of her life experiences, observing and absorbing what goes on in the intimacy of other people’s homes and families—ranging from the banal to the macabre—while suppressing her own frustrated desires and trauma. Narrated by Bapela herself, it is the perspective of one who has spent the majority of her life servicing the dreams of others, attempting to use her experiences to break through to her own. Director Lindiwe Matshikiza leads a multidisciplinary creative process in producing this collaboratively-made portrait of the often precarious, sometimes miraculous position of an African female migrant worker.
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. 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, and most recently, About Some Meaningless Events (1974) by Mostafa Derkaoui.
Location
The Labia Theatre
Directions
Date & Time
Friday, 24 July 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 One Take Grace (2021) by fierce not shady.
