Ethiopia, Nigeria, Madagascar, and Senegal Filmmakers Selected for Inaugural Final Cut: New African Shorts

Four African short film projects have been selected for the inaugural Final Cut: New African Shorts, a collaboration between Locarno’s Open Doors and Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur. The filmmakers and their projects include Ethiopian Tesfa Maryam Dargai Molla‘s The Chair That Listens, Nigerian Dika Ofoma’s Tooth, Malagasy Morgane Razafinony‘s Mia, and Senegalese Jam Abdoulaye Sall‘s Suka Naayo. The selected filmmakers will each have 15 minutes to present their  projects in development at the 30th Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur. The pitch, scheduled for 5th November, 2026, is presented under the festival’s Special Industry Presentation titled Final Cut: New African Shorts. 

The Final Cut: New African Shorts is a newly curated platform dedicated to outstanding short film projects from across the African continent with the intent of giving promising new works early international visibility and connecting African filmmakers with key representatives of the international short film industry. 

In Ofoma’s, fiction, Tooth when a five-year-old is injured while trying to undo a superstition about his fallen tooth, his mother’s response exposes the unfair burden placed on the teenage girl charged with raising him.

Molla’s The Chair That Listens is a documentary project that follows barber Bezabeh inside an Addis Ababa barbershop. As he becomes “the chair that listens” absorbing unedited grief, tragedy shatters the neighbourhood, pushing his quiet endurance to a breaking point. Blending observational realism and Azmari melodies, the documentary explores urban empathy’s hidden cost and when the healer goes under. 

Razafinony’s Mia, fiction projects, follows the eponymous Mia, a 9 years old, who has never seen the outside world beyond her home. So, on the eve of her departure from the city, her best friend Sophie takes her on an impulsive escape, determined to give her the best day of her life.

Sall’s Suka Naayo, fiction, follows Yerel, a neighbourhood shopkeeper, as he struggles to save Dickel, his ailing wife, and protect their son Ablaye. Caught between daily hardship, pervasive corruption, and constant humiliation, Yerel desperately searches for the money to treat his wife. In this race against time, he is ready to do anything – even defy the forbidden. 

After their pitches at the ongoing 30th Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, only one of the projects will be selected to take part in The SFC | Rendez-vous Industry (formerly known as the Short Film Corner), a non-competitive professional forum dedicated to short film creators and industry members at the 2027 Cannes Film Festival.