A festival built around gathering people in one room had to pause when gathering itself became impossible.
Lights, Camera, Africa! last held in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic came soon after, making the in-person experience at the centre of the Lagos festival difficult to sustain. Taking the festival online did not make much sense to its organisers either. If the point was to bring people together around films, filmmakers, music and conversation, a virtual substitute could only go so far. Funding challenges also kept the festival from returning.
Seven years later, LCA! is coming back for its tenth edition.
The festival will hold its 2026 edition from October 1 to 3 at the MUSON Centre, Lagos, under the theme Convivium: In Gathering. Founded in 2011 by curator and cultural producer Ugoma Ebilah, the festival is returning with support from Open Society Foundations and MTN and a new plan to keep its work going beyond the main festival.
Speaking at a media briefing ahead of the return, Ebilah explained that the festival’s long absence was not simply a matter of choosing to stop.
“Why would we gather when we can’t gather”, she says. “COVID went away but then funds became an issue.” All of these issues, still present today across the global festival ecosystem, compounded and made it difficult to just jump back in.
The festival will now take place every two years, with film screening events, musical performances, art and photography showcases, social gatherings hosted in between editions. The aim is to avoid another long silence and keep LCA!’s community connected to its work throughout the two-year cycle.
“Convivium is about cinema as an encounter, between films and audiences, and among all of us,” Ebilah said in the festival’s press statement.
The 2026 programme will include a selection of feature-length and short films from Nigeria, Africa and the diaspora, accompanied by filmmaker Q&As and public conversations on migration, memory, identity, homecoming, the African city, independent filmmaking and the ways African stories are told and preserved. According to the festival coordinator, Angel Akua, curating the lineup was a fairly straightforward process leveraged on existing connections with the filmmakers and community.
Among the selections is Matias Mariani’s Shine Your Eyes, which was selected for the Panorama section of the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival. Ema Edosio’s When Nigeria Happens, the first African film to open the Open Doors Screenings at the Locarno Film Festival, will also screen. Ifeyinwa Arinze’s Breast Milk will screen for the first time in Nigeria following its international festival run.
Akinola Davies Jr.’s Lizard (winner of the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival) joins Praise Odigie Paige’s Birdie (which had its world premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival).
The festival’s return is not being framed by Ebilah as an attempt to change the film industry or tell filmmakers what their work should be.
“I don’t really want to do anything for the film industry,” she said during a media briefing. “My mission is not to change what somebody else is doing.”
She described LCA!’s interest as being centred on “the story,” “the creativity” and “the artistry”, distinguishing that work from the commercial side of the industry.
That distinction has remained important to the festival as conversations around African cinema have become increasingly tied to markets, financing and commercial activity. LCA!, Ebilah said, is not a market or a commercial activation. Its interest lies in the artistic and cultural life around film and other art forms, including the possibility that some of the work presented could become part of history.
The 2026 programme begins on Thursday, October 1, with welcome drinks, an opening screening and a filmmaker conversation. Screenings, Q&As and public conversations continue on Friday and Saturday, with Senegalese singer and guitarist Obree Daman performing a live set at the close of the festival on October 3.
Admission is free, with support from Mbari Kola: The Arts Society.
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