Lights, Camera, Africa! (LCA!) returns to Lagos from 1–3 October 2026 with Convivium: In Gathering, its first edition since 2019.
Taking place at the MUSON Centre, Lagos, the free three-day festival will bring audiences together around films, conversations, music, and the encounters in between. Founded in 2011 by curator, cultural producer, and Festival Director Ugoma Ebilah, LCA! has become one of Lagos’s distinctive cultural platforms, creating a space in which filmmakers, artists, writers, musicians, thinkers, students, and audiences can engage with African cinema and contemporary cultural life.
The 2026 edition marks both a return and a reintroduction.
Convivium: In Gathering considers cinema not simply as a programme of films to be watched, but as a reason to come together, a space for attention, encounter, conversation, and collective reflection.
“After six years, it mattered that LCA! return not simply with a programme, but with an invitation: to watch closely, think together and rediscover what becomes possible when people share a room. Convivium is about cinema as encounter, between films and audiences, and among all of us.” — Ugoma Ebilah, Festival Director
Across the three days, the programme will feature a selection of feature-length and short films from Nigeria, Africa and the diaspora, alongside filmmaker Q&As and public conversations exploring migration, memory, identity, homecoming, the African city, independent filmmaking, and the ways African stories are told and preserved.
Programme Highlights
The 2026 film programme includes Matias Mariani’s Shine Your Eyes, selected for the Panorama section of the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival, and Ema Edosio’s When Nigeria Happens, the first African film to open the Open Doors Screenings at the Locarno Film Festival.
Also screening is Akinola Davies Jr.’s Lizard, winner of the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at the 2021Sundance Film Festival, alongside Birdie, written and directed by Praise Odigie Paige, which had its world premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
Together, these films begin a wider programme concerned with movement, memory, belonging and the fragile, often surprising meanings of home.
The festival opens on Thursday, 1 October, with welcome drinks, an opening screening and filmmaker conversation, followed by an evening of music and hospitality. Screenings, Q&As and public conversations continue throughout Friday and Saturday.
LCA! 2026 will close on Saturday, 3 October, with a special live set by Senegalese singer and guitarist Obree Daman, bringing the three-day gathering to a celebratory close.
For LCA!, the return to Lagos is about rebuilding a space for cinema and cultural exchange and creating a record of the conversations that emerge from it.
After years away, that room is opening again.
