Nigeria’s Dika Ofoma was the big winner at today’s (August 12) awards ceremony for the 23rd edition of Locarno’s talent development programme Open Doors for his debut feature Till The Morning Comes (Kachifo).
The production by Blessing Lizzi’s Lagos-based Bluhouse Studios received one of the Open Doors Grants sponsored by visions sud est and the City of Bellinzona to the value of CHF20,000 (€21,000) as well as picking up the €6,000 Prix Arte Kino International for development and the Sørfond Award which gives the project an opportunity to take part in the Norwegian pitching event this November.
Ofoma’s €1.3m romantic drama, which is set to begin shooting at locations in the Nigerian state of Enugu from October 2026, draws inspiration from the difficulties the director has experienced coming to terms with his sexuality and pursuing romantic relationships with other men in a country where same-sex attraction is considered taboo and criminalised under the Nigerian constitution.
“Kachifo serves as a means for me to express my beliefs about love and hold conversations around it,” Ofoma said. “If there was an agenda with this film, it would be that love, in whatever form it comes, should thrive.”
Zimbabwe’s Naishe Nyamubaya received an Open Doors grant worth CHF25,000 (€26,500) for his second feature project Black Snake which blends grounded drama with magical realism to present a portrait of a nation searching for meaning and identity after colonialism and Christianity silenced its ancestral traditions.
The €840,000 production by Zimbabwean-American producer Sue-Ellen Chitunya of Harare and US-based 263 Reels won the Red Sea Lodge jury prize in 2023.
A third Open Doors Grant to the value of CHF5,000 (€5,300) went to Burkinabe filmmaker Azata Soro’s feature-length documentary Diary Of A Goat Woman with animation elements, which is planned as a co-production between Ivory Coast’s Les Studios Indigo and Burkina Faso’s Othas Media.
Meanwhile, France’s CNC development grant worth €8,000 went to the Congolese filmmaker Erickey Bahati for his documentary The Bilokos offering a new perspective on the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the resilience of former combatants who are now rebuilding their lives in the chaos city of Goma. Kinshasha-based Giresse Kassonga of Gikas Films has France’s Florent Coulon of Vraivrai Films onboard as co-producer for the project which had previously won the €50,000 Filmac-Casablanca film lab award and backing from Fonds Images de la Francophonie and FJCF.
Awards by Open Doors’ partners
In addition, several of Open Doors’ partners sponsored awards for participants across the programme’s three strands of the Projects Hub, Producers Lab and Directors Club.
One of this year’s Producers Lab participants, Angolan producer-director Kamy Lara of Luanda-based Ulka Filmes, received the Rotterdam Lab Award enabling her to attend the next edition of the Rotterdam Lab.
Lara, whose main focus at Open Doors had been to present the fiction feature film project Vanda she is developing as a director, was also presented with the Open Doors – World Cinema Fund Audience Strategy Award which offers “a specific programme tailored and geared to closely follow the development of an audience engagement strategy”.
Another Producers Lab participant, Rwanda’s Mizero Kabano Yannick of the Kigali-based film company Imitana productions, received the Open Doors–OIF–ACP–EU Award’s €2,500 development grant and the Tabakalera-San Sebastian Film Festival Residency Award which was presented for the second time at Open Doors after its launch last year.
Since joining Imitana, Yannick has produced two shorts currently in post-production and is developing two feature film projects as well as managing Rwanda’s only independent cinema Cine Mayaka and coordinating the Kigali Cine Junction Film Festival.
He is also a co-founder of the brand-new Pan-African film distribution platform Screen Connect which was officially launched by One Fine Day PIx and GIZ’s Moving Picture programme this June.
Meanwhile, the Nairobi-based creative producer-screenwriter June Wairegi of Giza Visuals has become the first recipient this year of the newly created MECAS Award which will enable her to take part in the next edition of the International Market for Almost-Finished Films (MECAS) in Gran Canaria in April 2026.
This year was the first of Open Doors’ cycle focused on the African continent, with six projects in development selected for the Projects Hub, along with six creative producers participating in the programme’s talent incubator, the Producers Lab, and five directors of films showing in the Open Doors Screenings as the Directors Club. The four-year focus on Africa will run until 2028.
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