Festival lineups get called “pan-African” more often than they earn the description. The 51st Toronto International Film Festival, running September 10 to 20, has assembled a selection that actually does: films and co-productions from Rwanda, Nigeria, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, and Egypt, spread across Special Presentations, Centrepiece, Platform, Discovery, Short Cuts, and — new this year — TIFF’s own dedicated industry market.
The Centrepiece programme carries the year’s biggest festival names. Ben’Imana, Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s Rwanda-Gabon-Côte d’Ivoire feminist debut that won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes this year, makes its North American premiere. Congo Boy, Rafiki Fariala’s Central African Republic-DRC drama that won Bradley Fiomona the Best Actor prize in Un Certain Regard, joins it. So does Soumsoum, the Night of the Stars, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Chad-France co-production, which won the FIPRESCI Award in Competition at Berlin. All three arrive at Toronto already decorated. The fourth Centrepiece African title, Daniel Oriahi’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, arrives without festival history behind it — its Toronto slot is a genuine world premiere, marking EbonyLife’s return to the festival circuit after Elesin Oba.
Beyond Centrepiece
The Nigerian presence extends past Centrepiece. Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa — the Lagos-set reimagining of Mrs Dalloway starring Sophie Okonedo and David Oyelowo, which premiered at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight — screens in Special Presentations, its North American premiere ahead of a NEON-handled US theatrical release in December. A Nigerian short, The Spectacular Death of Prisca, plays Short Cuts.
South Africa contributes two films in two different registers: Future Tense, a South Africa-Australia co-production, in Centrepiece, and John Trengove’s The Smell of Apples — a South Africa-Netherlands-Chile co-production following a sheltered eleven-year-old white South African boy’s gradual reckoning with apartheid’s brutality — making its world premiere in the Platform section. Ghana is represented by Zjili: A Story of Sisterhood and the Burdens of Excess, a Discovery-section feature from Christine Boateng and Hajara Musah Chambas exploring sisterhood and social expectation through a distinctly Ghanaian lens. Egypt appears via the France-Belgium co-produced short The Day I Smoked a Cigarette with My Father, also in Short Cuts.
Kenya’s New Front Door
The most structurally interesting addition is Kenyan, and it isn’t a Centrepiece slot — it’s a market one. Call Me Queen, a Kenya-Germany-UK-France co-production set in Nairobi in the late 1990s, following a Rwandan woman and an Irish journalist confronting pharmaceutical companies during the AIDS crisis, has been selected for Market Screenings at the inaugural edition of TIFF: The Market, running September 10 to 16. TIFF launching its own dedicated industry market this year — and a Kenyan co-production being part of its first edition — is a marker worth noting separately from the prestige of the Centrepiece slots. Markets are where deals get made, and Kenya having a seat at TIFF’s newest commercial platform from its first year is a different kind of foothold than a screening slot, one this publication has argued East Africa specifically needs more of following the disruption to its regional financing since Showmax’s shutdown.
Why the Full Map Matters
What makes this year’s TIFF African selection worth naming as a whole, rather than film by film, is the geography itself. Rwanda and the Central African Republic and Chad rarely appear together in a single major festival’s African slate — these are cinemas that, individually, get a fraction of the international attention that Nigeria’s or South Africa’s industries receive. TIFF 2026 assembling work from all of them, alongside the more established Nigerian and South African contingents, and doing it with genuine competitive and market weight rather than token inclusion, is closer to what “continental” coverage should mean than most years’ festival lineups manage.
RollCallAfrica will be at TIFF tracking the African selection across all six sections — the Un Certain Regard graduates carrying festival momentum into Toronto, the two genuine Nigerian world premieres testing themselves without a safety net, and Kenya’s first steps inside TIFF’s new market. The People’s Choice Award, decided by audience vote rather than jury, has historically rewarded exactly the kind of emotionally direct storytelling that Ben’Imana, Congo Boy, and Clarissa each offer in different registers. Whichever way that vote goes, the map this year is the real headline.
— Amara Diallo. RollCallAfrica. 31 August 2026. Sources: Toronto International Film Festival official (2026 programme), Broadcast Media Africa (East African cinema at TIFF 2026, August 2026), Black Girl Nerds (TIFF 2026 Black films to watch, August 2026).
