Creative: Festival founder Mbali Mashaba (inset) created a platform where people get to network, find collaborators and funders through a shared love for short films. Photos: Supplied
From its inception, the Reel to Reality Film Festival has always been about celebrating African and diasporic cinema, “where the past, present and future converge through a showcase of bold, uncompromising voices”.
Now, returning for its sixth year, the festival continues to spread the message under the theme of “An African City” to encourage continued discourse on what it means to be African, who belongs and who gets to make that choice.
With a simple doctrine of bringing together filmmakers, creatives and lovers of culture, this weekend of screenings, discussions and networking promises to be one you do not want to miss.
Festival founder Mbali Mashaba tells us how she conceived this space. “I was concerned about the fact that no one was going to watch my films.” Asking herself what would happen if she was unable to get her work into theatres, especially as a short film director who understood that short films rarely, if ever, get cinema screens. The answer was creating the infrastructure she felt was lacking.
“I also wanted to speak to my audiences in person,” the multi-hyphenate creative says, “to ask them questions and see what they think of the work.”
Cultivating a culture with real people and real discourse was important, as well as quantifying the impact of her films in terms of numbers and feedback, something Mashaba understood very well as a creative researcher and junior commercials director who has worked on campaigns for brands like Volkswagen SA, KFC and Coronation.
The Reel to Reality Film Festival, the birth child of Mashaba’s curation and production company, Behind Her Lens Visuals, began as a way to create space where filmmakers and film lovers could get together, watch films and discuss them.
It has grown significantly over the years into a platform where people get to “network, find collaborators and funders and all these different people [we] don’t have access to”, through a shared love for short films as a model.
Every year, the festival has a challenge to respond to society, Mashaba says. “To respond to the social, political and socioeconomic times.”
She says the theme was decided last year, encompassing the spirit of Africa and African diasporic societies in metropolitan areas.
“The festival exists to amplify the voices of emerging and independent filmmakers of African descent, cutting across borders and socio-political divides to foreground auteur, emotionally gripping and thoughtprovoking stories.”
This year promises to be one where that ideal is pushed to its fullest with films by directors from Senegal, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Rwanda and Somalia, to name a few.
An African City imagines a unified engine of cultural, social, economic vibrancy and growth. This year’s festival slate is broken up into showcases that invite audiences to have important conversations on archiving, migration, community, oppression and various other themes that the films tackle.
With sessions like Who Belongs Here?, Echoes of the Earth, Tender Ruptures, Entangled, and All That Is Lost, this year’s iteration of the Reel to Reality Festival promises its patrons a weekend where our lived realities as African people are pulled up on screen and dissected by us in our own voices.
This is why the stories exist and will continue to — we refuse to turn a blind eye to the realities and histories they’re challenging.
Taking place across Johannesburg and Cape Town on 17 and 18 October and 25 October, the event is laying out an incredible pro-gramme with film screenings, panels and an introduction of an inaugural writing initiative.
“Our opening and closing films are headline films for a reason,” Mashaba says when asked which film she is looking forward to the audiences seeing. Will Niava’s Jazz Infernal, a film that did very well at Toronto Sundance, will open the festival.
“It's a really beautiful film about an Ivorian trumpeter that arrives in Canada with nothing but the legacy of his dad and he has to find his way in the city for the first time. It’s different. It uses music as an intergenerational device, a form of legacy and a connection to a past, to someone who is dear to you. This is a beautiful story by a filmmaker who I am really excited about, even in terms of his future and what he’ll make next.”
Closing Reel to Reality Festival will be Echoes Beneath the Hill by Aime Octave Ishimwe, a film set in 1994 Rwanda. “The country is on the verge of the genocide and this story is told from the perspective of a 10-year-old child who has to realise just how much her identity means to the world. She really has to realise how that affects her everyday friendships with people that she plays with.”
Among the many other films that will be screened across the two cities are DEMM, Taxi Moto, Lil_ith, The Last Harvest, Spilled Milk, Perception, Indlela Yokubuya, We Must Begin Again and Dread.
“This year the festival has moved away from doing lots of panels and lots of Q&As and lots of talks. It is intentionally focusing on specific things: Retrospective, Script Studio and Q&As. It's important to respond to the needs of your audience and the industry. Festivals should interrogate if the things that they are doing every year are working,” Mashaba says.
On the Retrospective Programme with Isithunzi, she say: ‘Being able to dedicate a programme to a particular work or artist of the past is really special because it reminds people of the stories that are important in a world where there’s so much access to information and content.”
The curator explains that the programme is about pausing and remembering what’s important. Isithunzi premiered 10 years ago and went on to achieve critical acclaim locally and internationally with Safta wins and two Emmy nominations for lead actress, Thuso Mbedu.While the celebration of the film will run throughout the festival’s Johannesburg programme, there will also be a panel discussion facilitated by actress and award-winning filmmaker, Palesa Buyeye, featuring Mashaba and various cast and crew from the show, like Amanda Lane, Makgotso M, Mmapula Letsoalo, Tkay Kaula and Sdumo Mtshali.
Earlier on, Reel to Reality announced a new addition to the pro-gramme: the inaugural Script Studio, a collaboration with The Emotional Club’s Screenwriting Club.
“This is a special screenwriting workshop for emerging screenwriters which, over time, we’re going to grow into a lab,” Mashaba says. “We’re thinking about how we can cultivate writers who are writing compelling stories and are supported. The Studio will give them access to mentorship and peer review” to ensure that they grow within the industry locally and globally.
Like any endeavour, challenges remain. While Mashaba and her team are grateful to the continued support from the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), we speak about how hard it is to get funders and investors to buy into programmes like this.
“Over time it will change,” Mashaba says, “because there are more film festivals. The culture is changing and growing, so I think over time we will see a bigger investment in film festivals.”
Reel to Reality Film Festival was founded around the Covid years, a precarious time for people in the creative industry. It all started with an idea that Mashaba believes has been and continues to be actualised.
Looking ahead, the filmmaker who was named one of Mail & Guardian’s 200 Young South Africans in 2025 and served as an adjudicator at the 8th Accra Indie Filmfest, believes that there is more to be done.
“More cross-border collaborations with other organisations and festivals, as well as programmers and filmmakers. The future looks more open for Africa and the diaspora becoming a platform that people travel all over the world to come to, to connect with African audiences and to have really important conversations about our identity, history and our future as well.”
The Reel to Reality Film Festival will take place at Artistry, Sandton, north of Johannesburg, and the Homecoming Centre in Cape Town.