In the 27 years of Encounters South African International Documentary Festival, the world has never been this desperate to be documented. Filmmakers take on tyrants like Putin, Al-Bashir, Musk, Bezos, and AI itself. They champion disruptors who fight femicide, defend indigenous land, or challenge corporate giants, and celebrate artists who push culture and move the world to a better place.
“In 2024, Encounters presented three of the five documentaries later nominated for Oscars, including the winner No Other Land,” explains Mandisa Zitha, Director of Encounters. “This year we’re raising the bar even higher with an excellent selection of films that speak to the role of the documentary and impact filmmaker in 2025.”
The festival showcases documentaries from over 40 countries at cinemas in Cape Town and Johannesburg from 19 to 29 June.
Encounters 2025 opens with How to Build a Library directed by Maia Lekow and Christopher King which premiered at Sundance earlier this year. Two Kenyan women transform a dilapidated library in downtown Nairobi into a vibrant centre for residents and creatives.
Audiences are invited to navigate the programme through five thematic collections.
The theme – The Frightening Reality of Now, captures a world in flux, besieged by war, climate collapse and leaps in technology not fully understood. Rather than spiral into alarmism and dread, these films confront the philosophical gravity of changes happening too rapidly for most of us to process.
Shifting Baselines (Canada) directed by Julien Elie does this hauntingly well, using a real-life parable playing out in a small Texan town, as swamps are drained, beaches closed, and residents bought out to make room for the launch facilities of Spacex, weighing Musk’s ambitions against the irreversible consequences of his frenetic space race.
The Thinking Game directed by Greg Kohs (USA) is a fascinating look at the development of AI. Visionary scientist Demis Hassabis, a TIME’s 100 most influential people of 2025 and his team strive to crack artificial general intelligence.
Intercepted, directed by Oksama Karpovych (Canada, France, Ukraine) tracks conversations between Russian soldiers and their families seized by Ukrainian intelligence.
The Tree of Authenticity directed by Sammy Baloji (Belgium, DRC), a film essay on the DRC’s colonial history and its ecological significance. There are three narrators; Paul Panda Farnansi the first black civil servant who recounts his experience in the Congo and Belgium during WW1, Albiron Beinaert a Flemish researcher based in the Congo Basin, and Lileko a 300-year-old tree.
The second theme – Ways of Learning focuses on wonderfully distinct aspects of education. The Shadow Scholars (UK), Brief Tender Light (USA),Fitting in (South Africa), and Mothers of Chibok (USA, Australia, Nigeria), deal respectively with the empowerment, commodification, cultural relativism, elitism, and gatekeeping of knowledge. They reveal access to information as a pivotal engine that drives societal structure.
In Eloise King’s The Shadow Scholars (UK) Professor Patricia Kingori of Oxford University travels to Kenya to find out more about the academic writing industry where she finds thousands of educated and technically adept but underemployed Kenyan graduates who are part of “Essay Mills” writing essays, exam papers, PHD thesis and other academic assignments for students at leading universities in the global north.
In Brief Tender Light (USA)directed by Arthur Musah a Ghanaian alum follows a group of ambitious African students from Tanzania, Rwanda, Nigeria and Zimbabwe at the elite MIT as they strive to become positive agents back home.
Fitting in directed by Fabienne Steiner (South Africa) focuses on the diverse experience of young South Africans as they begin their studies at the select former Afrikaans university, Stellenbosch.
Mothers of Chibok directed by Joel “Kachi” Benson (Nigeria) focuses on mothers ten years after Boko Haram terrorists abducted 276 girls from a school in Chibok, Nigeria, who fight to educate their remaining children. They toil and suffer, driven by a deep belief that education is the path to a better life.
The biggest collection of documentaries falls in the theme Agency – Standing up to Power for good reason. Here subversives met with persecution in daily life may be celebrated onscreen, as these impact-driven documentaries present defiance, resilience and quiet courage.
In Mr Nobody Against Putin directed by David Borenstein and Pasha Talankin (Denmark, Czech Rep.) follows an event organiser and videographer in a small-town school in Russia who secretly documents the disturbing transformation of the school into a war recruitment centre during the invasion of Ukraine.
The Blue Road directed by Sinaed O’Shea (Ireland, UK) explores the extraordinary life of writer Edna O’Brien who, in 1960, wrote a sexually frank debut novel “The Country Girl” and became a literary sensation but became known as the woman who scandalised Catholic Ireland. She led a turbulent life, had numerous affairs, and mixed with the glitterati. She died at 93 having written 34 fiction and non-fiction books.
Union, byBrett Story and Stephen Maing (USA), follows a group of former and current Amazon workers who, up against one of the world’s most powerful companies, begin an unprecedented campaign to unionise their warehouse in Staten Island, New York.
Capturing Water directed by Rehad Desai (South Africa) uncovers the social, political, and environmental challenges at the crux of the ongoing water crisis in Cape Town.
The Brink of Dreams follows four teenage women in southern Egypt who form a feminist street theatre troupe challenging social norms and spark conversation around gender equality. The film by directors Nada Riyadh and Ayman El Amir is a sympathetic study of their most pivotal choices.
Womxn: Working directed by Shanelle Jewnarain (South Africa) engages with a group of fearless women activists waging a battle to decriminalise sex work against the backdrop of South Africa’s femicide crisis.
In Khartoum directed by Ibrahim Snoopy, Ahmad Timeea Mohamed, Amad Rewia Alhagi, Philip Cox, and Anas Saeed (Germany, UK, Sudan, Qatar), five protagonists’ stories intertwine as they navigate the dangerous landscape of their war-torn Sudan.
Normal To Me directed by Luke Sharland (South Africa) intimately explores the lives of people with special needs all employed at a protective workshop in the seaside town of Fish Hoek, Cape Town.
6 Kings and 6 Queens (South Africa), directed by Molatelo Bossman, delves into the fierce power struggle surrounding the Modjadji Rain Queen’s throne and the Balobedu Kingdom — a matriarchal monarchy that has been ruled by women for over two centuries.
Two films where the local community stand up to authority are Yintah by director Jennifer Wickham, Brenda Michell and Michael Toledano (Canada) that looks at the impact on the lives of the Witsuwit’en people who live on unceded territory as they oppose the construction of municipal pipelines; and Where Zebus Speaks French in which director Nantenaina Lova (Madagascar, Burkina Faso, Germany, France) examines the struggle of subsistence rice paddy farmers in Madagascar to keep their land in the face of a presidential project which involves Chinese interest and the military.
YUMI (Vanuatu, Fiji, USA, UK, Egypt, Netherlands) directed by Felix Golenkoi tells the inspiring story of law students who set out from the University of the South Pacific as part of a movement to take climate change to the International Court of Justice through the United Nations to save their home islands from extinction.
The theme Memory, Trauma and Identity gathers personal and political reckonings of the residue of the past that lingers in the present, within the minds, within the family, within the nation. Healing inherited trauma, confronting loss, or reclaiming erased histories, memory is both burden and balm in these threads of heritage.
Albie: A Strange Alchemy directed by Sara de Gouveia (South Africa) celebrates the 90th birthday of the renowned Judge Albie Sachs charting his journey from civil rights lawyer and struggle hero to Justice of the Constitutional Court.
Matabeleland directed by Nyasha Kadandara (Zimbabwe, Kenya, Botswana) meditates on the role of ritual in grief through its endearing protagonist Chris Nyathi, who is convinced that the chaos in his multiple splintered families stems from the unresolved death of his father at the hands of Mugabe’s regime.
In Kethiwe Ngcobo’s And She Didn’t Die (South Africa) a daughter traces her mother’s journey from apartheid activist to feminist writer showing how storytelling became both inheritance and revolution.
Kabul Chaos directed by Thomas Brémond, David Périssère, Nils Montel and Myriam Weil (Afghanistan), looks at four years when David Martinon, the current French Ambassador to South Africa, was Ambassador to Afghanistan (2018-2021) and was in charge on 15 August 2021 when the Taliban took Kabul. Martinon was the last foreign diplomat to leave Kabul, and he wrote a book about this experience.
Filmmaker Gaël Kamilindi embarks on a quest in Didy (Rwanda, Switzerland, France), chronicling his return to Rwanda to uncover the story of his late mother. Having grown up in Switzerland, detached from his roots, the retracing of his mother’s life through the voices of women who knew her.
Director Areeb Zuaiter revisits Gaza and experiences her homeland through the eyes of Ahmed Matara, a parkour athlete, inYalla Parkour (Gaza, Palestine).
In Abo Zabaal 89 (Egypt), filmmaker Bassam Mortada confronts the legacy of his parents’ political activism marked by his father’s imprisonment, and emotional estrangement—as he pieces together their story t in a quest for truth, reconciliation and healing.
The Art and Impact frames the inherent ability of the arts to document injustice, shift culture, and move people to action.
The Walk directed by Tamara Kotevska (UK, US, Macedonia) documents the extraordinary journey taken by Little Amal, a 12-foot puppet created by Cape Town’s Handspring Puppet Company representing millions of child refugees, embarked on a 8000 km journey across Europe to raise awareness of this human tragedy.
Director Nhlanhla Mthethwa’s (South Africa) Sam Nzima: A Journey Through His Lens examines the work of Sam Nzima, the photographer who took the iconic picture of Mbuyisa Makhabo carrying the body of the dying 12-year-old activist Hector Pietersen on June 16th, 1976.
Legendary auteur Wim Wenders’s Anselm(Germany) is an immersive documentary about Anselm Kiefer is one of the world’s greatest contemporary artists touted as a filmic gift for art lovers.
Misty: The Erroll Garner Story directed by Georges Gachot (Switzerland, France, Germany) Erroll Garner was a self-taught American Jazz pianist considered a genius by his peers who changed Jazz forever.
Encounters takes place at the Labia Theatre and V&A Waterfront Ster-Kinekor in Cape Town and The Bioscope and The Zone @ Rosebank in Johannesburg from 19 to 29 June 2025.
For the full schedule of films, and to buy tickets, visit https://encounters.co.za.