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NBO Film Festival returns to Nairobi 15-25 October 2026 across four venues with three competitions, a landmark retrospective and its biggest programme yet.
There is a particular argument embedded in the theme of this year's NBO Film Festival that is worth sitting with. African cinema has spent decades travelling the world — earning awards at Cannes and Berlin, building audiences in London and New York, finding recognition on the international festival circuit that has historically been the primary route to visibility for filmmakers from the continent. Cinema for Us, the theme of NBO 2026, turns that trajectory around. The festival's seventh edition is built on a simple but significant belief: African cinema should not only travel the world. It should be experienced by African audiences, at home, together.
From 15 to 25 October 2026, NBO Film Festival returns to Nairobi with its largest programme yet, screening across four venues: Prestige Plaza, Unseen Cinema, Kaloleni Social Hall and Alliance Française Nairobi. The spread of venues is itself a statement about who the festival is for — from a mall cinema to a community social hall, the 2026 edition is deliberately building cinema into Nairobi's wider public life rather than keeping it within a single premium space.
The seventh edition is the most ambitious since the festival launched, expanding in three directions simultaneously.
The competition programme grows from one to three juried categories. The returning Fiction Feature Film Competition is joined by two new additions. The Nick Wambugu Prize for Documentary, named in honour of Kenyan filmmaker Nick Wambugu, recognises the best documentary in competition — a category that formalises the festival's engagement with non-fiction African storytelling. A new Short Film Fiction competition adds a competitive home for short-form work, recognising excellence in one of the most vital and accessible forms in contemporary African cinema.
Competition jury chairs will be announced on 4 September. The three competition selections follow on 7 September. The opening film and major Special Presentations are announced on 10 September. Tickets go on sale on 12 September, with the complete programme and screening schedule released on 14 September.
The most historically significant addition to the 2026 programme is one that has never been attempted before: NBO's first-ever filmmaker retrospective. Dedicated to acclaimed Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis, the retrospective brings together a body of work that spans some of the most celebrated African cinema of the past two decades. Supported by EUNIC, the European Union National Institutes for Culture, the retrospective will be accompanied by Gomis himself, who will attend both audience and industry events throughout the festival. The full retrospective line-up is announced on 9 September.
Alain Gomis is one of the defining voices in contemporary African cinema. Born in Paris to a French mother and Senegalese-Gambian father, he grew up between cultures and has built a body of work that reflects that particular position — deeply rooted in West African experience while engaging with the universal questions of identity, belonging and spiritual life that make his films resonate far beyond their specific settings.
His film Tey, known internationally as Today, won the Silver Stallion at FESPACO 2013 — Africa's most prestigious film award. Félicité, his portrait of a singer navigating life in Kinshasa following a family crisis, won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2017, bringing him the kind of international recognition that his work had long deserved.
What makes the NBO retrospective significant beyond the films themselves is the fact that Gomis will be present for conversations with both audiences and industry professionals. The opportunity to see a body of work in sequence and then discuss its evolution directly with the filmmaker is genuinely rare, and it transforms the retrospective from a programme section into one of the most substantive cultural events Nairobi will host this year.
Cinema for Us is not only an audience-facing ambition. The 2026 edition strengthens NBO's commitment to the future of African cinema through an expanded industry programme designed to connect filmmakers, industry professionals and audiences in productive ways.
The NBO Project Showcase gives emerging and established filmmakers a platform to present work in development to regional and international industry professionals. Creative labs and professional exchanges create structured opportunities for skills development and collaboration. The ambition behind the expanded industry programme reflects a mature understanding of what a film festival can do beyond simply screening completed work: it can be part of the infrastructure that determines what gets made next.
Mbithi Masya, Artistic Director of NBO Film Festival, articulated the vision directly:
"Cinema for us means creating a space where audiences can discover, celebrate and engage with the stories being made across Africa and beyond. We want this festival to be part of Nairobi's public life and a place where people come together to experience cinema, exchange ideas, recognise excellence and imagine what comes next. With our biggest programme yet and additional competitions, NBO 2026 is about building a deeper culture of cinema and making sure African audiences have a place in the conversation."
Alongside the competition screenings and the retrospective, NBO 2026 extends into Nairobi's neighbourhoods through community programmes, City Dialogues and filmmaker conversations designed to bring cinema into contexts where it might not otherwise reach.
The inclusion of Kaloleni Social Hall as a venue signals this intention most clearly. Kaloleni is a historic neighbourhood in Eastlands where community life has long been anchored around social spaces. Screening African cinema there — alongside the more central venues of Alliance Française and Prestige Plaza and the more specialised environment of Unseen Cinema — is a deliberate geographical expansion of who the festival speaks to and where it chooses to exist.
Festival dates: 15 to 25 October 2026
Venues: Prestige Plaza, Unseen Cinema, Kaloleni Social Hall, Alliance Française Nairobi
Trailer and ticket sales: 12 September
Full programme and schedule: 14 September
Mark 12 September in your calendar. That is when tickets go on sale and the full scope of what has been programmed becomes visible. For a festival that has been quietly building one of the most serious African cinema programmes on the continent, the seventh edition looks like the one where the ambition becomes fully legible.
FORE MORE: WWW.NBOFILMFEST.COM | TICKETS UPDATES HERE
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