The Reel to Reality Film Festival returns for its sixth year with a restructured delivery model, running across Johannesburg and Cape Town on 17, 18 and 25 October. Founder Mbali Mashaba has stripped back the programme to three focused offerings, the Retrospective, the Script Studio and Q&As, and the screenings will run across two venues: Artistry in Sandton, north of Johannesburg, and the Homecoming Centre in Cape Town.
“This year the festival has moved away from doing lots of panels and lots of Q&As and lots of talks,” Mashaba says. “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.”
The festival itself began as an act of infrastructure building. Mashaba, who curates and produces through her company Behind Her Lens Visuals, founded it around the Covid years because the screening and gathering space she felt was missing for African and diasporic filmmakers, particularly in short film, simply did not exist. “I was concerned about the fact that no one was going to watch my films,” she says. Short films rarely get cinema screens. Rather than accept that gap, she set out to close it. “I also wanted to speak to my audiences in person,” she says, “to ask them questions and see what they think of the work.”
What started as a screening and discussion space has since grown into a working platform where people “network, find collaborators and funders and all these different people [we] don’t have access to”. Mashaba, a creative researcher and junior commercials director who has worked on campaigns for Volkswagen SA, KFC and Coronation, also wanted to quantify the impact of films through numbers and feedback, grounding the festival’s cultural work in measurable outcomes.
The Retrospective Programme with Isithunzi anchors the Johannesburg leg. Isithunzi premiered 10 years ago and achieved critical acclaim locally and internationally, with Safta wins and two Emmy nominations for lead actress Thuso Mbedu. The celebration runs throughout the Johannesburg programme, anchored by a panel discussion facilitated by actress and award-winning filmmaker Palesa Buyeye, featuring Mashaba and cast and crew members including Amanda Lane, Makgotso M, Mmapula Letsoalo, Tkay Kaula and Sdumo Mtshali. “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,” Mashaba says.
Meanwhile, new capacity is being built. The inaugural Script Studio, a collaboration with The Emotional Club’s Screenwriting Club, is a screenwriting workshop for emerging writers that Mashaba intends to grow into a lab over time. “We’re thinking about how we can cultivate writers who are writing compelling stories and are supported,” she says. “The Studio will give them access to mentorship and peer review” so that writers can grow within the industry locally and globally.
On the screening schedule itself, Will Niava’s Jazz Infernal, which did very well at Toronto Sundance, opens the festival. Mashaba describes it as “a really beautiful film about an Ivorian trumpeter that arrives in Canada with nothing but the legacy of his dad”, one that “uses music as an intergenerational device, a form of legacy and a connection to a past”. The festival closes with Echoes Beneath the Hill by Aime Octave Ishimwe, set in 1994 Rwanda and told from the perspective of a 10-year-old child coming to understand what her identity means to the world and to her everyday friendships. Other films screening across the two cities include DEMM, Taxi Moto, Lil_ith, The Last Harvest, Spilled Milk, Perception, Indlela Yokubuya, We Must Begin Again and Dread, with directors from Senegal, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Rwanda and Somalia among those represented.
The programme is organised into showcases built around the theme “An African City”, decided last year to encompass the spirit of Africa and African diasporic societies in metropolitan areas. The sessions, including Who Belongs Here?, Echoes of the Earth, Tender Ruptures, Entangled and All That Is Lost, invite conversations on archiving, migration, community and oppression.
Delivery has not been without friction. While Mashaba and her team are grateful for continued support from the National Film and Video Foundation, she speaks about how hard it is to get funders and investors to buy into programmes like this. “Over time it will change,” she 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.”
Mashaba, named one of Mail & Guardian’s 200 Young South Africans in 2025 and an adjudicator at the 8th Accra Indie Filmfest, sees more to be done: more cross-border collaborations with other organisations, festivals, programmers and filmmakers, and a future where Africa and the diaspora become a platform people travel from all over the world to visit, to connect with African audiences and to have important conversations about identity, history and the future. Whether the funding landscape shifts quickly enough to keep pace with what the festival is building remains the open question for its next five years.