Tanzanian Director Neema Ngelime Wins Three Awards at Locarno Open Doors for Debut Feature Documentary
A Tanzania-born director's first feature documentary has walked away from the 2026 Locarno Film Festival's Open Doors programme with three awards, adding momentum and funding to a project still in the works.
Neema Ngelime's The Ones With the Tempered Flowers won the Sørfond Award, the ARTEKino International Award, and the EAVE Award at the close of Open Doors, the Locarno festival's co-production platform and talent development programme (The Hollywood Reporter, 14 August 2026; Yahoo Entertainment, 10 August 2026). The ARTEKino prize carries €6,000, according to the Locarno festival's own press release.
The film was presented as a work-in-progress at the 2026 edition of Open Doors, which selected it in June and announced its winners in August. The programme connects film-makers from underrepresented regions with international producers, sales agents, and funders — the people who decide what reaches screens a year or two on.
Ngelime's documentary is a Tanzania-Kenya co-production produced by Ivy Kiru for LBx Africa, the production company behind the project (The Hollywood Reporter, 14 August 2026; LBx Africa, 11 August 2026). It is described as a hybrid documentary — staged rather than purely observed — following a woman studying her body's relationship to self, to society, and to the political weight placed on women's bodies in Tanzania, challenging what Ngelime calls duty masked as love.
The film grew from anger. Ngelime has said her diagnosis with fibroids — non-cancerous growths in the uterus — and the lack of interest she saw in understanding women's bodies drove her to make the film (The Hollywood Reporter, 14 August 2026).
Before turning to features, Ngelime made three short films: A Country In A Corner, a 16-minute documentary from 2022; Hooyo, Why Here; and An Ode to A Time I Loved Bread (The Hollywood Reporter, 14 August 2026; Locarno Open Doors project page).
What makes this stand out is the trajectory. Ngelime and Kiru had already pitched the project at the FIFO film event before arriving at Locarno, and a Berlinale Talents profile had listed the film as in development (LBx Africa Facebook; Berlinale Talents profile). Three awards from a single festival market — two of them carrying direct funding or industry access — move a first-time feature director measurably closer to a finished cut.
The next question is always the same one at this stage: who picks up the project for distribution. Open Doors exists to help answer that, and the 2026 winners list has now been written.
