In its 46th edition, the Durban International Film Festival (DIFF) returned in July 2025 as one of Africa’s most vibrant cinematic gatherings. Held in South Africa’s coastal city of Durban, the festival continues to champion bold, socially engaged, and deeply local storytelling, while also offering a stage for global independent cinema that often slips under the radar of mainstream circuits.

DIFF 2025 remained rooted in its commitment to decolonizing the screen — with a strong focus on African voices, stories of the diaspora, and urgent films about migration, inequality, gender identity, and postcolonial trauma. This year’s selection blurred the borders between fiction, documentary, and hybrid forms, often privileging slow cinema, poetic realism, and personal resistance narratives.

Notable titles included the haunting Mozambican drama The Salted Wound, the quiet Namibian road movie Rain Doesn’t Fall Here Anymore, and Fragments of Sand, a South African docu-fiction tracing water access across rural KwaZulu-Natal. International gems like the Indonesian film Letters to a Drowned Island and the Chilean feature Lo Que No Decimos added layers of global solidarity to the programme.

The festival also hosted powerful industry conversations through the Talent Durban platform, which nurtures emerging African filmmakers. The atmosphere — vibrant, local, multilingual — turned cinemas, beaches, and community halls into shared spaces of cinematic urgency and cultural exchange.

DIFF remains a crucial space to witness how cinema can resist, remember, and rebuild, especially from the margins of the world map.

2025 Award Winners:

• Best Feature Film: The Salted Wound (Mozambique)
• Best Direction: Rain Doesn’t Fall Here Anymore (Namibia) – Dir. Tashiya Mvula
• Best Screenplay: Lo Que No Decimos (Chile)
• Best Actor: Mandla Khumalo in Fragments of Sand (South Africa)
• Best Documentary: The Things We Carry (Ghana)
• Best First Feature: Letters to a Drowned Island (Indonesia)
• Best Short Film: As We Wait for the Rain (Kenya)
• Talent Durban Award: Between the Drums by Ayanda Ndlovu

Check the official website for further information