Real People, Real Stories, No Fiction Required. The Encounters Documentary Festival returns this June with powerful South African and international films screening across Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria.
There’s a street poet living on the streets of Johannesburg who has published two volumes of poetry. A botanist waging a one-man war against international succulent poaching syndicates in the Richtersveld. A painter processing a brutal near-death attack through canvas and colour. A woman in Khayelitsha who built the township’s first all-girls cycling group.
These are not fictional characters. These are South Africans, and this June, their stories get a cinema screen.
Encounters, Africa’s leading documentary festival, returns for its 28th edition from 4 to 14 June 2026, with screenings, masterclasses, panels and Q&As across Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria. The lineup this year is quietly extraordinary. If you’ve been sleeping on documentary as a genre, this is the edition that will change that.
Homegrown and Unmissable
The South African films alone make a compelling case for clearing your calendar.
Inyembezi Zendoda follows Lwanda Dlamini, who uses painting as therapy to process being brutally attacked and left for dead.
Just Because I’m a Street Kid introduces us to Shorty the Melville Poet, a man who has published two volumes of poetry while living on the streets of Johannesburg, and who will almost certainly be the most interesting person you encounter on screen this year.
Vet vannie Land tracks botanist Pieter van Wyk and his fierce, unlikely battle to protect the Richtersveld and Succulent Karoo from international poaching syndicates targeting rare succulents. It took home three awards at Silwerskermfees, including Best Short Documentary.
Her Khaltsha spotlights Khayelitsha’s first all-girls cycling group, and The Hands That Feed is a loving tribute to Decameron, the beloved Italian restaurant in Stellenbosch.
Then there’s Concerto, perhaps the most quietly devastating of the local offerings, which follows pianist Nina Schumann as she prepares to perform Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 at Woordfees while navigating focal dystonia and Parkinson’s disease. It is, by any measure, a portrait of extraordinary courage.
And for anyone grappling with Cape Town’s layered, complicated past, WAT WAS HIE? moves through the city’s histories of colonialism, slavery and Indigenous resistance, using movement and memory to reactivate landscapes that have long stayed silent.
The World in 90 Minutes or Less
Beyond our borders, the lineup travels far and wide, getting delightfully strange along the way.
Olinda’s Golden Arches documents a Brazilian town where McDonald’s went bankrupt under a communist mayor. Sueña Ahora takes us inside blackout-stricken Cuba.
As I Lay Dying revisits Iran’s Green Movement Uprising. And My Jebba Story sees street photographer turned filmmaker Kagho Idhebor cast his lens on everyday life on Jebba Street in Lagos.
Award pedigree runs deep across the international selection too. Nuisance Bear arrives fresh from winning the Sundance Grand Jury Prize. American Doctor took the HotDocs Audience Prize. Berlin winner TUTU screens alongside opening night film Truck Mama, which sets the tone for a festival that refuses to play it safe.
The Short Film Renaissance
One of the most exciting threads running through this year’s edition is the calibre of the short documentary lineup, and what it says about where the form is heading.
“Short documentaries are becoming more popular every year,” says Encounters festival director Mandisa Zitha. “They’re no longer just a career launchpad; they’re now some of the most inventive and urgent filmmaking happening today.”
The programme makes a strong case. Mama Micra, a stop-motion animation about a director’s unorthodox mother who lived in palaces, under bridges and in her car, won Best Short at Full Frame and a Special Mention at IDFA, the world’s biggest documentary festival.
Kurt Orderson, who previously won the Audience Award at Encounters, returns with Amigo The Griot, about a blind hip hop storyteller in Eersterivier. And Kenyan filmmaker Sam Soko, who won at Sundance with Softie, co-directs One Last Order, about a woman’s final shift after 37 years at a Florida drive-thru, which swept both the Jury and Audience awards at the Oscar-qualifying Aspen Shortsfest.
Short films, it turns out, have never had more to say.
No Filter
Documentary has always had the power to do what fiction sometimes can’t: sit with real people in real moments and refuse to look away. This year’s Encounters lineup is full of exactly that: filmmakers who turned their cameras on the uncomfortable, the overlooked and the quietly remarkable, and trusted their subjects to carry the weight.
From the streets of Johannesburg to the cliffs of Mexico, from rural Suurbraak to a drive-thru in Florida, the world is full of stories that deserve a screen. This June, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria get to be the room where they’re told.
Encounters runs 4 to 14 June 2026. Full programme and tickets at encounters.co.za. Screenings in Cape Town at The Labia Theatre, V&A Waterfront Ster-Kinekor, Bertha House Mowbray and Bertha Movie House in Khayelitsha.
Screenings in Johannesburg at The Bioscope and Rosebank Nouveau, Ster-Kinekor Sandton and Ster-Kinekor Southgate and in Pretoria at Ster-Kinekor Brooklyn Commercial.
