Silicon Valley African Film Festival Announces 76 Films From 33 Countries for 2026 Edition

For 17 years, the Silicon Valley African Film Festival (SVAFF) has created a space for African and African diaspora filmmakers to bring stories from the continent and beyond to audiences in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now, the festival returns for its 17th edition with a programme that reflects the geographic and creative breadth of contemporary African cinema.

The SVAFF has announced 76 films from 33 countries for its 2026 edition, which will run from October 8 to 11 at the Historic Hoover Theatre in San Jose, California. The programme spans animation, documentary features, documentary shorts, and narrative features and shorts, bringing together filmmakers working across the African continent and the wider diaspora.

Of the 76 selected films, the lineup includes productions from 21 African countries: Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritania, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda and Zimbabwe. The selections also extend beyond the continent, with films connected to African diaspora communities in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, Guadeloupe, Réunion and the United Kingdom.

The festival’s narrative feature selections include Nigerian director Wande Thomas’s Spiraling, Gabonese filmmaker David Mboussou’s AFROTŌPIA, Zimbabwean filmmaker Angela Zivo Gapa’s RUSAMBO, South African director Lwazi Duma’s THULEBONA, and Ugandan filmmaker Matovu Martin Eric’s The Unforgivable.

The 76-film programme speaks to one of SVAFF’s central purposes: challenging the narrow ways Africa is often represented on screen. African cinema is frequently treated as a single category, despite the enormous differences in language, history, geography and filmmaking traditions across the continent. A lineup stretching from Gabon and Benin to Tunisia, Uganda, Nigeria and Zimbabwe makes a different case. There is no single African story, only an expanding collection of stories emerging from different societies and told in different forms.

For SVAFF, however, the work of changing how audiences encounter African stories does not begin and end with its annual festival. The organisation has positioned itself as a year-round platform for African cinema, taking films beyond traditional festival settings and into the communities where conversations about Africa and its representation are already underway.

Its African Cinema Café initiative, for instance, brings films into more intimate spaces, including cafés, libraries and community centres. Screenings are accompanied by facilitated discussions and panel conversations, creating opportunities for audiences to engage with the films beyond  simply watching them. The festival also runs a school engagement programme, Africa in the Classroom, that introduces curriculum-related African films to elementary, middle and high school students. Drawing from a library of more than 500 African films, SVAFF facilitators present films and lead conversations with students, using cinema to expand how younger audiences understand African societies, histories, and cultures.

These initiatives point to the broader impact a festival can have when it sees itself as more than an annual event. Film festivals are often understood primarily as places for premieres, awards and industry networking. But organisations such as SVAFF also serve as cultural institutions, building audiences over time and making African cinema part of everyday cultural and educational life.