The five participants of Open Doors Directors make for an instant list of international talent to watch.
In addition to a programme of talks, workshops and industry networking as part of LocarnoPro, the directors will see their completed films, either shorts or features, showcased in Open Doors Screenings, an official section of the Locarno Film Festival.
This year’s five filmmakers comprise: Fagamou Fama Ndiaye (Senegal), Rediet Haddis Yalew (Ethiopia), Pocas Pascoal (Angola), Judith Nini Kibinge (Kenya), and Ariel Añez (Mozambique).
Fagamou Fama Ndiaye
Ndiaye is bringing her self-produced, 12-minute experimental short Concrete Moves to Open Doors. A former coordinator at Dakar’s Yennenga Centre — Senegal’s first cultural centre dedicated entirely to cinema, founded by Franco-Senegalese director Alain Gomis — Ndiaye aims to use documentary as a space to explore women’s experiences in Senegal.
She is now developing the feature documentary Maty Or The Real Life, a personal, intimate film based on her own life. When her mother’s health begins to deteriorate, she returns to the Senegalese capital to talk to her about two generations of women caught between duty, social expectations and personal desires.
Ndiaye has already secured development backing from Senegal’s Maïssa Fund and OIF (International Organisation of La Francophonie) for the project. She is also an alumna of international programmes including the Circle Women Doc Accelerator, a training initiative and safer space for women and gender-expansive filmmakers; the London-based journalist support programme One World Media; and the IDFA Academy in the Netherlands.
Rediet Haddis Yalew
Ethiopian visual artist and architect Yalew will be attending Locarno with her experimental 17-minute documentary short sKINs_Addis Abeba. Her work explores memory, migration and material culture through film, immersive installation and garment-making.
Yalew is now developing the next two instalments in the series: sKINs_Essen will go into production during a residency programme hosted by PACT Zollverein in Essen, Germany, later in 2026.
Additionally, sKINs_Dorze, focusing on the Dorze community in the highlands of southern Ethiopia, is in development.
Pocas Pascoal
Director, videographer and scriptwriter Pascoal was born in Angola and studied cinema in Paris. She has directed several documentaries and short films and is attending Open Doors and Locarno with her six-minute experimental short, Time To Change.
Her 2011 semi-autobiographical debut feature Alda Et Maria (All Is Well) follows two teenage sisters who flee the Angolan civil war for Lisbon in 1980, facing the harsh realities of survival, displacement and poverty as illegal immigrants.
Pascoal is now developing a feature based on the life of Sarah Maldoror, a young French-Guadeloupean filmmaker who began shooting her first feature in Guinea-Bissau in 1970. Accompanied by her friend, photographer Suzanne Lipinska, she travels to the Bijagós Islands to fight colonial oppression through cinema. Pascoal’s project is set against the violent colonial war of liberation, as Maldoror begins her quest for equality through filmmaking.
Judith Nini Kibinge
Kenyan filmmaker Kibinge is a familiar face on the international circuit and one of East Africa’s highest-profile filmmaking champions. She made her directorial debut in 2002 with Dangerous Affair, a film about relationships and the lives of young people in Nairobi, followed by Something Necessary in 2013, based on the struggles of a woman whose husband dies after the 2007 election violence in Kenya.
In 2013, she founded DocuBox, the first independent documentary film fund in Sub-Saharan Africa. By the time she stepped down after a 13-year tenure as executive director in late 2025, the fund had supported over 150 documentary and short-fiction films across the African continent.
Kibinge has since co-founded Keja, a creative campus in Nairobi designed to support creative entrepreneurs. She will arrive in Locarno with the 28-minute GOAT, a Kenyan supernatural folk thriller marking her return to hands-on filmmaking after a decade away.
Kibinge is now developing her fourth feature, The Lakelands, in which two ancient lakes in the Rift Valley are merging and destroying each other in the process. At the centre of this slow natural disaster is a couple in love, their relationship subject to its own slow collapse.
Ariel Añez
Meanwhile, Maputo-born filmmaker Añez’s 14-minute short Submergido debuted at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam and also screened at Italy’s FESCAAAL (African, Asian and Latin American Film Festival).
Born in 2001, Añez grew up in an artistic Mozambican household and cites filmmakers Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Yasujirō Ozu and Krzysztof Kieślowski as influences. Añez says he seeks to explore human experience through intimate, honest moments and the African condition through a decolonised lens.
He is developing a pair of animated shorts: And Perhaps I Will Never Remember, selected for the IndieLisboa Film Lab earlier this year, is an Afro-surrealist short about an elderly Mozambican man who, near death, revisits the memory of his shaman father performing a ritual between life and death.
Every Night, I Dream of My Dreams, made with painter Maria Chale, explores the silenced artistic potential of a young woman constrained by social norms in Mozambique.
Screenings
Being able to observe how an audience responds to their films is crucial. “An understanding of the road map to developing an audience [for their films] is important,” says South Africa-based curator, producer, arts manager and consultant Mitchell Harper, who helped to select the five directors. “Building audiences in their local constituency but also travelling internationally with these and future projects is the goal.”
Fellow selection team member, producer Tiny Mungwe, also from South Africa, agrees. “It delivers the feeling for the filmmakers that the work they’re doing is validated, that they’re not alone walking the path and can build and expand their networks,” she says of the screening experience.
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