Short Film Competition Spotlight

Our annual Short Film Competition returns for the fifteenth year, showcasing the work of emerging filmmakers from across the continent and the diaspora. This year's shortlist was selected from over 1,000 entries, and the finalists comprise a broad range of films, each with a unique style, narrative, and voice.

2022 Jury

The shortlist was compiled by our Emerging Curators cohort. The jury winner, who will receive £500, is selected by our jury of acclaimed Black / African creatives and will be announced on our website at the end of the festival. The 2022 jury consists of:

Ekwa Msangi is an award-winning writer and director. Her critically acclaimed feature film "Farewell Amor" premiered in competition at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, and won the Sundance Amazon Producer’s Award, NYWIFT Directing Award amongst other distinctions, and was bought for distribution by IFC Films for North America, MUBI and Netflix for Worldwide. Previous to that, Ekwa wrote and directed several shorts, including award-winning comedy Soko Sonko, and Farewell Meu Amor starring Tony Award nominee Sahr Ngauja, and Nana Mensah. Recent awardsand recognition include 2020 Sundance Momentum Fellow, 2020 BAFTA Breakthrough, 2022 USA Artist Fellow, and 2022-2024 ReFrame Rise Director.

Fradique is an Angola filmmaker, and the director of the critically acclaimed films Alambamento, and Independência. His first feature film Air Conditioner had its world premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in the Bright Future category, and participated in more than forty film festivals and received ten international awards. In 2021, the film went on to have worldwide distribution by MUBI, quickly becoming a critics' gem. As a filmmaker and one of the founders of the Angola collective Geração 80, he is an advocate of global south cinema.

Libyan-South African director Khalid Shamis has a long career as a promo director in the satellite television realm, with made-for-TV content from the West to the Arab world. Having worked in the film industries of the UK, Middle East and Southern Africa, Shamis now runs Tubafilms, his own production company, from Cape Town.