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.
For our seventh screening, we turn to Sambizanga (1972), directed by Sarah Maldoror. Made before the Angolan War of Independence had concluded and only released in Portugal after the country had been ejected from Angola, Sambizanga traces the conditions from which the revolution emerged. At its centre is not only the machinery of resistance, but the quiet, pervasive resilience of women who sustain the struggle.
The men are the most visible actors in the making of the revolution. They meet in secret, exchange information, formulate plans and make the conscious decision to confront the colonial state. Yet it is the women who keep the revolution moving. Their labour is less spectacular but no less consequential. Where the men must speak of their actions, their intentions and their sacrifices, the women simply continue. They carry the struggle through the ordinary rhythms of daily life, both in isolation and collectively.
There is something thrilling about Maldoror’s film: a conviction that, despite the brutality that surrounds its characters, victory is possible. But there is also a particular security in the matter-of-factness with which women’s participation in the revolution is rendered. Maria, played by Cape Verdean economist Elisa Andrade, remains undaunted each time she is directed to another building, another town or another office in her search for the truth about her imprisoned husband. Around her, women respond to each new obstacle with movement. There is no stopping. No surrender. No permission to remain helpless.
The challenges they confront are at once political and profoundly ordinary: feeding and clothing children in conditions of poverty, keeping families together, sharing information, offering shelter and providing support to their sisters, neighbours and strangers. In Sambizanga, these acts are not peripheral to the revolution. They are its infrastructure.
The women’s resistance is neither spectacular nor hurried. It is sustained by a slow and steady insistence on moving forward. What begins as one woman’s task can be carried by another; what cannot be accomplished by a friend can be taken up by a neighbour, or by a stranger who becomes a companion through the simple recognition of a shared condition. Solidarity emerges not as an abstract ideal, but as a practice of continuing.
There is never much doubt in Sambizanga that the revolution will succeed. Its certainty lies not in the grand gestures of its men, but in the accumulated movement of its women: in the quiet rhythm of their feet, carrying information, carrying children, carrying grief, carrying one another, and, ultimately, carrying the revolution forward.
erating 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); Difret (2014) by Zeresenay Berhane Mehari, and In the Year of the Quiet Sun by the Otolith Group.
Location
The Labia Theatre
Directions
Date & Time
Friday, 30 October 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 Sambizanga (1972), courtesy of Sarah Maldoror.
Turning Towards the Sun: Pan-African Film Caravan is presented in collaboration with the African Film and Media Arts Collective (AFMAC) and BMW.
