In a national industry still working towards meaningful diversity, African Film Fest Australia is an important showcase that expands what Australian audiences see, and how we can understand African cinema as neither marginal or monolithic – but as formally inventive, politically engaged and very much relevant on a global stage.
Expanding from Sydney into Melbourne this year, the festival positions itself as a national platform for African cinema, cultural exchange and diverse storytelling. Here are three must-see films in the 2026 program.
African Film Fest Australia highlights – quick links
The Fisherman
Playful, fantastical yet political, The Fisherman follows Atta Oko, a retired Ghanaian fisherman who forms an unlikely friendship with a talking fish and journeys from his coastal village to Accra. What starts off as an absurd premise becomes a meditation on modernity, displacement and culture.
The Fisherman embraces humour, folklore and tonal hybridity in its magic realist approach to comedy. By blending folklore with urban satire, director Zoey Martinson subverts Western expectations for African cinema to be austere or ‘issue-driven’. The talking fish is comic and uncanny, and operates as a symbol of how contemporary aspiration intrudes upon older ways of life. Meanwhile Atta’s displacement reflects broader everyday tensions between tradition and urbanisation.
For Australian audiences, particularly in multicultural urban spaces, the film resonates as a diasporic mirror. It asks what is lost when communities are forced to adapt too quickly, and what forms of storytelling might preserve those losses.
Nawi
If The Fisherman is whimsical, Nawi feels grounded and urgent. This Kenyan coming-of-age drama centres on a young girl’s dream to pursue education despite being forced towards an arranged child marriage.
The narrative is rooted in social realism, but Nawi refuses to reduce its protagonist to victimhood. Instead, the film foregrounds the titular main character’s agency. Nawi’s determination pulls the narrative firmly into a space of defiance. This is reinforced by the warmth of its visual language – with expanses of sunlit Kenyan landscapes paired with intimate handheld close-ups – that create visual tension between the vastness of hope and the claustrophobic constraints imposed on the child.
Nawi is also distinguishable by its collaborative authorship. Directed by a team of Kenyan and European filmmakers – Vallentine Chelluget, Kevin Schmutzler, Apuu Mourine and Tobias Schmutzler – the film is the result of a transnational process that mirrors its thematic concerns around how stories travel, and how they are shaped in dialogue with global audiences.
It is a film that is specific to rural Kenyan life but also widely accessible, as proven by its international festival success. Importantly, Nawi challenges the consumption of African suffering as spectacle within an global context. African Film Fest Australia’s programming here is deliberate. The film does not simply present a social issue to gawk at, but frames African cinema as a site of ethical engagement. In doing so, it invites Australian audiences to engage not as distant observers but as implicated viewers within global systems of inequity.
Fanon
Directed by Jean-Claude Flamand-Barny, this biographical drama traces the life of Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial theorist, during his time in French-occupied Algeria. It situates Fanon at the intersection of medicine and revolution, showing how his psychiatric work revealed the psychological violence of colonialism. As political tensions escalate, his intellectual commitments become inseparable from action.
Fanon turns its gaze to history with a beautiful immediacy. It renders Fanon’s personal life with subtlety and restraint, framing moments of intimacy and doubt as inseparable from the intellectual and political pressures shaping his public role. The cinematography, too, is restrained and deliberate, using tight framing and stark contrasts of light and shadow to evoke the intimacy of Fanon’s clinical gaze, as well as the volatility of a society on the brink of revolution.
In a settler-colonial nation, Fanon’s ideas about power, identity and resistance remain deeply relevant. Today, the film becomes a space for reflection on colonial legacies, right at home.
African Film Fest Australia screens from 27 to 29 March at Cinema Nova, Melbourne.
This article is published as part of ArtsHub’s Creative Journalism Fellowship, an initiative supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.
