Fez — The 23rd Tarifa-Tangier African Film Festival, known as “FCAT,” will run from May 22 to 30, with Tangier hosting the opening gala and the screening of Damien Hauser’s “Memory of Princess Mumbi.”

The opening night will take place at the Cinémathèque de Tanger, also known as Cinema Rif, with Hauser expected to attend alongside lead actress Shandra Apondi. The Kenyan-Swiss film, set in the futuristic African country of Umata in 2093, blends science fiction, artificial intelligence, romance, and African mysticism.

After nearly a quarter century, FCAT has become one of the main platforms connecting African and African diaspora cinema with audiences in Spain, Europe, Latin America, and Morocco. The festival was created in 2004 and has operated across Tarifa and Tangier since 2016, using the Strait of Gibraltar as both a geographic and symbolic bridge between Africa and Europe.

A competition beyond victimhood

This year’s official feature competition, “Hipermetropía” (Hyperopia), brings together 14 fiction and documentary films by six female and eight male directors from around a dozen African countries.

The selection moves from the Maghreb to Cape Town, through the Congo and the Horn of Africa, with films that explore memory, exile, family, urban struggle, female resistance, and formal experimentation.

The festival’s framing steers away from victimization narratives and instead highlights what it calls the sovereignty of the individual gaze. In practice, that means a program built around resistance, self-definition, and cinematic experimentation rather than a narrow image of suffering.

Films centered on ancestral memory include “Ancestral Visions of the Future” by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, “Ceux qui veillent” (“Those Who Watch”) by Karima Saïdi, and “Memory of Princess Mumbi” by Hauser.

Works focused on women’s resistance include “The Women Who Poked a Leopard” by Patience Nitumwesiga, “Cotton Queen” by Suzannah Mirghani, “One Woman, One Bra” by Vincho Nchogu, and “Promis le ciel” (The Promised Sky) by Erige Sehiri.

Morocco is also present in the competition through “Bouchra,” directed by Meriem Bennani and Orian Bakri, a film listed among the works addressing contemporary urban realities.

African islands at the center

This year’s retrospective will focus on African islands and island diasporas under the theme “Orillas Compartidas: las imágenes de las Islas Africanas” (Shared Shores: Images of the African Islands).

The program looks at how cinema represents island nations and communities such as Cape Verde, Madagascar, the Comoros, Equatorial Guinea, Mauritius, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.

The theme treats islands not only as isolated territories, but as cultural bridges shaped by migration, resistance, multilingual identity, and routes across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

That focus gives the edition a wider political and cultural frame. By looking at African island imaginaries, FCAT is also asking how cinema can tell stories from spaces often treated as peripheral, despite their deep historical links to Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

Training, dialogue, and film industry links

Alongside the film program, FCAT will host the 14th edition of “El Árbol de las Palabras” (The Tree of Words), a forum for training, dialogue, and professional networking.

The 2026 forum will run from May 23 to 30 under the title “The Shared Shore: Images of the African Islands.” It is organized with the support of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation through its “ACERCA” cultural training program.

The forum reflects one of FCAT’s long-standing roles: not only screening African cinema, but also supporting professional exchange, film distribution, education, and cultural cooperation.

This year’s edition also marks a new stage in the festival’s organization. After 22 editions led by founder Mane Cisneros, FCAT is now moving forward under a new collective leadership model, following her departure from the director role.