African Cinema in Its Own Critical Language
Modern Times Review presents ten articles developed through the 2026 DFM Young Critics Talent Press
At the 2026 Encounters South African International Documentary Film Festival, four participants in the DFM Young Critics Talent Press watched films whose histories, neighbourhoods and political pressures were often close to the worlds from which they themselves write.
Developed through Talents Durban with the Durban FilmMart Institute and FIPRESCI, the programme supports emerging African critics while recognising that criticism gains something essential from cultural proximity.
For Modern Times Review, the participants reviewed six feature documentaries. The Eyes of Ghana confronts the struggle over national film memory, while Truck Mama follows women as they enter the heavily gendered world of long-distance transport. My Father and Qaddafi searches through political disappearance and family history. Kikuyu Land considers inheritance, colonial dispossession and the continuing contest over Kenyan land. Marxism and Period Pains turns menstruation into a question of labour and public policy. Notes from the Underground enters the music, memory and political imagination of South Africa’s cultural margins.
Four further essays move across the Encounters short-film programme. “Ordinary Resistance” examines communities responding to institutional abandonment. “Marginal Neighbourhoods” considers how art and collective memory challenge the external gaze. “Artistic Vulnerability” enters the exposure behind performance and creative work, while “Articulating Instability” traces fractured cities, contested identities and the unstable archive.
Read the complete DFM Young Critics Talent Press series in Modern Times Review.
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