South African cinema takes centre stage at Joburg Film Festival 2026

Two lauded South African films will bookend the Joburg Film Festival when it returns from 3–8 March 2026, opening and closing the city’s flagship cinematic event with stories rooted firmly in local history, myth and memory.

Opening the festival on 3 March is Laundry (Uhlanjululo), the debut feature from Zamo Mkhwanazi, fresh from its international premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was hailed as “thrilling African cinema” by Film Fatale. Described by Variety as possessing “the gloss of 1990s historical dramas,” the film is set in 1960s South Africa and centres on a Black family running a laundry business under rare permission in a whites-only district.

At its heart is Enoch, played by Siyabonga Shibe, a patriarch fighting to protect his family’s fragile livelihood in a system designed to exclude him. His son, portrayed by Ntobeko Sishi, harbours artistic ambitions that complicate the family’s already precarious position. As the threat of imprisonment looms, the story becomes a meditation on survival, dignity and the quiet theft of intergenerational wealth under apartheid. The cast also includes Bukamina Cebekhulu, Tracy September and Justin Strydom. While opening night attendance is by invitation, the film will screen again for the public on 7 March at Nu Metro Cine 1 in Hyde Park.

Closing the festival on 8 March is the South African premiere of The Trek, a western-horror by first-time director MeekaeeI Adam. Set in 1846, the film follows a Dutch-Afrikaans family and their British benefactor as they journey across the Kalahari Desert to claim land, guided by a mysterious Khoen traveller. As hunger, exhaustion and mistrust fracture the group, two spectral figures drawn from Southern African folklore hover at the edges of the story.

“The land isn’t just a backdrop,” says Joburg Film Festival curator Nhlanhla Ndaba about The Trek. “It’s alive. It’s judging them.”

Blending historical realism with mythic storytelling, the film reimagines the western survival genre through a distinctly Southern African lens. It interrogates colonialism not as distant history but as an ongoing moral and spiritual reckoning, a theme that feels particularly urgent at this moment. The cast includes Morné Visser, Maurice Carpede, Camilla Borghesani, Trix Vivier and Rob van Vuuren, with Adam already earning recognition from the Directors Guild of South Africa’s Creatives Awards.For Ndaba, the pairing of these two films is intentional.

“Both Laundry and The Trek delicately balance texture with technique and navigate their subject matter with real confidence,” he says. “These are stories rooted in uniquely South African contexts that invite audiences to think, feel,and actively journey with the characters.”