Five rising African directors have been selected to screen their short films in the 2025 Open Doors programme.
Screen charts their filmmaking careers to date as they prepare to step into the spotlight of the Locarno Film Festival.
Abdoulaye Sall (Mauritania)
The Last Journey (Le Dernier Voyage), the debut short film of director and editor Abdoulaye Sall, explores the themes of justice and identity. Shot in Mauritania and Senegal, it tells the story of a man who returns home after a long journey to resumes his old job as a street vendor to support his family. When he is late home one day, his wife and son scour the city in search of clues to his disappearance.
Prior to Locarno, the short screened at festivals including the Monstra Festival of African Cinemas in Brazil, the Maghreb Film Festival of Oujda, the Luxor African Film Festival and the Brussels International Film Festival. It represented Mauritania at the Vues d’Afrique Festival in Montreal.
Sall, who trained at the Yennenga Centre in the Senegalese capital Dakar, the first post-production centre in West Africa, is now developing his first feature. Where Is My Father (Ndikiram) extends the themes of his short, telling the story of a man who is arrested on his wedding day. His new wife begins a relentless search for her husband, while his son, who witnessed the arrest, struggles to understand a world that has taken his father.
Amina Abdoulaye Mamani (Niger)
Actor and director Amina Abdoulaye Mamani is writing her first fiction feature The Repentent (Le Repenti), about a young man enrolled in a jihadist camp where he becomes progressively dehumanised, both physically and psychologically.
Her 2023 short film The Envoy Of God (L’Envoyée De Dieu) is screening in Locarno. It is about a 13 year-old girl who is kidnapped and left in the market where her mother has a stall with an explosive belt tied to her waist. The film has picked up plaudits at international festivals on the African continent, in the US and across Europe including at Clermont-Ferrand and Durban Film Festival.
Mamani works as a director and producer at Diam Production in Burkina Faso. She studied at IFTIC Niamey, a vocational and technical training school known for being the only college in Niger to offer a journalism course, and completed an internship in the production department of national broadcaster Télé Sahel.
Her first feature documentary Sur Les Traces De Mamani Abdoulaye in 2018 saw the filmmaker return to Niger to document her father’s life, 26-years after his death, through archive footage, contemporary witness accounts and interviews with his friends and associates. Her father Abdoulaye Mamani was a Nigerien poet, novelist and trade unionist.
Patience Nitumwesiga (Uganda)
Filmmaker Nitumwesiga is the founder of Shagika, an art collective working with talent from across the African continent. Their work explores decolonised perspectives on gender, power, loss, memory, death and hope. Shagika is an active verb that means to uplift or to nurture a person or an idea.
Nitumwesiga, who has directed plays at Uganda’s national theatre, has also made short films that have screened in festivals such as Interfilm Berlin and the Pan African film festival. 2023’s Jangu, about two sisters who are forced to walk home after a night out who stumble into a witch’s parlour and are granted their wish for a world without men.
She is now producing the documentaries The Woman Who Poked the Leopard, about feminist African icon Stella Nyanzi who was forced to leave Uganda for Germany in 2022, and Tongue Of The Spear which details the story of a rural Ugandan grandmother who tries to protect her village land from developers.
A fiction feature called How To Forget Your Name is also in the works. It is described as an Afro-futurist fiction about a Ugandan genius who travels to the future to find a cure for her dad but finds that black people are illegal there.
Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda (Congo-Iran)
South Africa-based Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda, who is of Congolese and Iranian heritage, is the founder and creative director at music and film hub The Collective for Black Iranians. The filmmaker is working on her debut feature documentary Queens of Freetown, Searching for FannyAnn, that explores the lives of trans and queer youth, from drag performance to university classes and family functions in Sierra Leone. It aims to uncover what happened to FannyAnn Eddy, the founder of Sierra Leone’s first LGBTQI+ organisation, who was murdered over 20 years ago.
Kounkou Hoveyda is a former human rights lawyer who worked with the UN in conflict-affected countries, negotiating the release of child soldiers. She moved into filmmaking in 2024 with her documentary short Where My Memory Began, set in Sierra Leone. It is now screening in Locarno. Where My Memory Began details the story of Elder Ballu who reflects on the histories of ancestors who crossed the Atlantic to return to Africa. It has screened widely at international festivals.
Most recently, Kounkou Hoveyda directed the fiction short We Will Be Who We Are, also set in set in Sierra Leone, that follows two best friends navigating societal pressures through the unconventional choice to marry each other.
Yasir Faiz (Sudan)
Yasir Faiz is writing his first feature project,The Martyr’s Wedding, set during the Sudan–South Sudan civil war. It follows a Sudanese jihadist whose beliefs unravel after capture, torn between a bond with an enemy and longing for his wife.
A filmmaker and sometime cultural journalist, Faiz was born in Sudan, grew up in Iraq and moved back to Sudan to complete his education where he began a career in journalism before moving into filmmaking. In 2010 the Goethe-Institut in Sudan put out a call for aspiring filmmakers and Faiz made the cut. He directed an experimental documentary released in 2011.
Subsequent short film efforts include Locarno title Bougainvillea which explores the stories of women detained during Sudan’s 2018 revolution.
Now based in Kenya, he has also produced a short film Ratrata, directed by Sadam Siddig and now in post-production. It is about two strangers who embark on a surreal night-time journey through Cairo, exploring the city and themselves.
Faiz’s resume also includes a co-writing credit on Journey To Kenya, co-written and directed by Ibrahim Snoopy , and a stint as second unit director on The Dog’s Shitter, also directed by Siddig.
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