The Tribeca Film Festival celebrates its 25th anniversary with its 2026 edition, running June 3 to 14 in New York City, and has unveiled an official lineup of 118 feature films and 86 short films including 103 world premieres. Seven African titles are in the selection across features and shorts. Nigeria and South Africa lead continental representation with two titles each. Cameroon, Morocco, and Egypt are present across the documentary, narrative, and shorts programmes.
The two headline African titles — both in the Viewpoints section, which Tribeca describes as “a showcase for directors who break rules, bend genres, and carve new cinematic paths” — could not be more different from each other in origin, method, and subject matter. That their differences are both present in the same section of the same festival in the same year is a useful illustration of the breadth of what “African cinema” actually contains.
One Woman, One Bra (Kenya/Nigeria)
One Woman, One Bra arrives at Tribeca for its North American premiere after one of the most decorated festival runs by an African debut feature in recent years. Written and directed by Kenyan filmmaker Vincho Nchogu and produced by Nigerian producer Josh Olaoluwa for his Lagos-based Conceptified Media, the film premiered at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival under the Biennale College Cinema section — the first Nigerian-produced film to premiere on the Lido — and subsequently won the Sutherland Award for Best First Feature at the BFI London Film Festival. It screened at festivals across several territories before reaching Tribeca.
The film follows Star — played by Sarah Karei alongside Amos Leuka, Irungu Mutu, and Norng’aruani Kipuker — a 38-year-old unmarried woman in the Kenyan village of Sayit whose unknown parentage threatens to cost her her home when land title deeds based on kinship ties are distributed to the community. Cinematography is by Muhammad Atta, whose credits include Beyoncé’s Black Is King. Roughly 70% of the cast and crew was drawn from the local community in Nkosesia where the film was shot.
Olaoluwa described the journey to Tribeca as proof that African stories will always “transcend borders and compete on the biggest stages.” The Sutherland Award at BFI is one of the more discerning prizes in international independent cinema — it recognises the best debut film screened at LFF across all sections. Its presence on One Woman, One Bra tells you the quality of the film’s formal and narrative ambition.
Crocodile (Nigeria/New Zealand)
The other African Viewpoints title is a different kind of story entirely. In Kaduna, Nigeria, a group of kids turned a backyard into a science fiction universe using a single phone and boundless imagination. Filmed over thirteen years, Crocodile follows their homemade film collective — known as The Critics — as creativity becomes a lifeline and a bold act of rewriting their futures. The film is co-directed by the collective itself and Pietra Brettkelly, a New Zealand documentary filmmaker. It is a New Zealand-Nigeria co-production. It world premiered at the Berlinale earlier this year and comes to Tribeca for its North American premiere.
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Thirteen years. A single phone. A Kaduna backyard. Science fiction. These are not the conditions in which a film that reaches Berlinale and Tribeca is supposed to be made. The story of The Critics is not primarily a story about filmmaking under constraint — it is a story about imagination as infrastructure, about a group of young people who decided that the cinematic universe they wanted to inhabit did not exist and so they built it themselves. That the film of their thirteen-year project is now in the Tribeca Viewpoints section is the kind of outcome that the conventional film development ecosystem did not produce and could not have produced.
The Wider African Presence
Jail Time Records from Cameroon — directed by Dione Roach and Steve Happi and produced with Giacomo Stucchi-Prinetti and Tabs Breese — is in the documentary competition. It profiles the first prison recording studio on the African continent and the three incarcerated artists who express themselves through it. Vultures, a French-South African co-production directed by South African filmmaker Dian Weys, continues its international festival circuit in Tribeca’s shorts narrative programme. APART, an animated short from a US-South Africa co-production, makes its global debut with Spike Lee as writer and South African illustrator and artist Pola Maneli as director. From North Africa: Mon Taxi (Morocco/US, dir. Meriem Sakrouhi) and the Egyptian narrative short 32B (dir. Mohamed Taher), which previously screened at Carthage Film Festival.
The 25th Tribeca Festival runs June 3–14, 2026 in New York City. The African Viewpoints titles screen in the first week of the festival. RollCallAfrica will cover the African programme in full.
Sources: Tribeca Festival 2026 official lineup (April 16, 2026), Afrocritik, Culture Custodian, What Kept Me Up, Nollywood Reporter, Variety (August 2025 — One Woman, One Bra). — Kwame Asante. RollCallAfrica, May 2026.
