Festival Agenda

Pelong Afrika – Heartlands Film Festival Africa – HFFA is conceived as a radical space for non‑commercial, experimental and art cinema that centres the African continent and its diasporas. We champion films that prioritise artistic risk, poetic vision and social resonance. Our programme is a deliberate counterpoint to mainstream narratives: we seek out works that embrace formal innovation, unconventional storytelling and the courage to confront difficult truths.

The festival’s significance lies in its location – Bloemfontein, the judicial heart of South Africa – and its timing across Freedom Day weekend. It is a gathering that reclaims cinema as a tool for introspection, resistance and community healing. By foregrounding filmmakers who operate outside commercial circuits, we provide a platform for voices that interrogate memory, identity, belonging and the unfinished project of decolonisation. Pelong Afrika is not merely a screening event; it is an assembly for those who believe that the most urgent stories are often the most fragile, and that the heart of a continent beats loudest in its independent cinemas.

The 2026 edition spans five days over two weekends (25–27 April and 1–2 May). It introduces two competitive awards (Pelo ya Rona and Khutla) and screens ten films mixing shorts and features, narrative and documentary. Our curatorial focus is two‑fold: first, to bring non‑South African African films that are rarely seen in the country; second, to unearth obscure or under‑distributed works that deserve a second life. This makes Pelong Afrika a unique destination for adventurous cinephiles and a vital counter‑voice in South Africa’s festival landscape.

Selected Films

Opening and Closing Films
The festival opens with Carlos Conceição’s Tiger Bay (Angola/Portugal, 2025). A man volunteers for a radical memory‑erasing procedure on a deserted island, seeking to shed guilt and reinvent himself. The closing night features Dani Kouyaté’s Katanga: Dance of the Scorpions (Burkina Faso/DRC, 2025). After a failed conspiracy against the crown, the king Pazouknaam names his cousin Katanga as head of the armed forces. Katanga consults a soothsayer, who tells him he will either succeed his cousin as king or die during a future coup. A timeless political fable adapted from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, shot in black and white.

African Focus: Nigerian Shorts
This strand showcases the bold, intimate cinema of contemporary Nigerian directors. Dika Ofoma (recipient of the 2026 Pelo ya Rona Award) presents five short films: Obi is a Boy (a femme‑presenting young man returns home for his mother’s funeral, forced to navigate violence and gender expectations); Something Sweet (a 40‑year‑old businesswoman risks scandal for love with a younger man, challenging societal double standards); God’s Wife (a widow must choose between Catholic guilt and her family’s demand to leave her matrimonial home); A Quiet Monday (siblings defy a secessionist sit‑at‑home order in south‑eastern Nigeria); and Nkemakonam (a pregnant teenager cast out by her village). Also included are Abbesi Akhamie’s The Incredible Sensational Fiancée of Sèyí Àjàyí (in the whimsical pan‑African city of Alkebulan, a brilliant scholar plots revenge after discovering her fiancé's engagement to another woman, sparking a hilarious roller coaster of love, deception, and unexpected empowerment) and Michael Omonua’s Rehearsal (a group of actors dress‑rehearse a play about a church group rehearsing a performative piece; it becomes clear that the church is a place of fake miracles, sexual exploitation, and graft).

Local Focus: Impact Films
Two powerful works rooted in the Free State: Future Lehihi’s Love at First Crime – a beautiful innocent woman named Britz is dragged into a high‑voltage situation after accidentally meeting Ghost, a rogue gang member and professional hijacker. After hijacking Britz, Ghost sees her purity and drives her home, sparking an unlikely journey of love and forgiveness. Also Femke & Ilse van Velzen’s Prison for Profit, an investigative documentary exposing the prison industrial complex in Mangaung, revealing how private incarceration exploits the poor and perpetuates systemic injustice.

Awards

Two competitive awards recognise outstanding achievement in African and diaspora cinema. The Pelo ya Rona Award (Our Heart) is granted to an independent African director for the most heartfelt portrayal of the continent and its people. The 2026 laureate is Dika Ofoma, honoured for his tender yet unsparing body of work that navigates gender non‑conformity, religious constraints, and communal exile. The Khutla Award celebrates a director from the Diaspora whose work reconnects with African mythology and memory. This year’s recipient is Carlos Conceição, whose film Tiger Bay weaves colonial guilt, forgetting and reinvention into a hypnotic, spectral journey. Full details on the Awards page →