Spling’s Top 5: The Best of the 2025 AFDA Graduation Festival
This year’s AFDA graduation film festival featured a wide array of short films that tackled difficult contemporary issues with resourcefulness, creativity and flair. Unafraid to dive headlong into diverse and even challenging aesthetics and genres, the festival once again presented a number of strong contenders.
Here are five of Spling’s favourite films that screened at this year’s student film festival across Cape Town and Durban:
Tomorrow is Too Far
Tomorrow is Too Far is a suspenseful crime thriller centred on three colleagues who become embroiled in a dangerous game. Starting with a casual conversation at work, they draw an innocent woman into their night out, but everything is not as it seems as the evening turns into something much more sinister.
The film features strong performances, delivering a claustrophobic and harrowing night-drive experience where a stopover in a sketchy neighbourhood turns violent. Helping with a lift, the innocent passenger unwittingly becomes an accomplice, discovering just how little she knows about her colleagues. It is a bleak and intense short film with tight framing that captures every detail of the performances as things escalate out of control.
By humanising the criminals, the film explores how an adrenaline rush affects them as they move from one precarious situation to another, only to discover they are not yet out of the frying pan. Tense, suspenseful, and jarring, it successfully translates heightened emotions and threats as the perpetrators discover the error of their ways. Tomorrow is Too Far is an effective thriller that cleverly combines sound design, performance, and editing to create an impactful and thoughtful crime drama.
The Boer and the Bride
South Africa is a diverse nation – a microcosm of the world where the “New South Africa” built a fledgling democracy. Set a few years into this new era, The Boer and the Bride is a culture-clash comedy centred on Masego and Andre, a mixed-race couple from different walks of life, who fall in love and decide to marry.
Similar to Fanie Fourie’s Lobola, the co-leads find themselves battling the prejudices of their families. Discovering the intricacies of lobola negotiations and etiquette around the “Bride”, the “Boer” fumbles his way through the process as he meets his bride-to-be’s family.
While the family is initially against the union, a gathering eventually softens their hearts. A well-written film with solid performances, The Boer and the Bride offers a funny and endearing look at cultural differences between Afrikaans and Tshwane traditions, utilizing wonderful locations and authentic settings.
The film manages to swathe you in the times without leaning too heavily on stereotypes. It offers an honest, mostly sensitive take on ordinary prejudices through a modern “Romeo and Juliet” lens. Through style, comedy, humour and earnest performances, the audience gains a fuller appreciation of the faux pas and challenges faced as barriers are deconstructed and new understandings are forged through healing.
Watch ‘The Boer and the Bride’
Umtsha Wendoda
This coming-of-age drama centres on a boy and his brother, who used to visit a waterfall as children. Now that they’re older, the journey to the waterfall is obscured by growing pains, proving your worth and accepting your fate. Beautiful natural settings form the backdrop for this emotional, ethereal and poetic drama about becoming and overcoming.
A natural flow forms the wave that carries this short film through a range of emotions. From brotherly fun and arguments to mentorship, Umtsha Wendoda charts the highs and lows of their relationship. Heartfelt performances capture the essence of this drama, which ventures from interpretative dance to philosophical conversation, set to some equally emotive music.
The beautiful locations, earnest performances, thoughtful writing, stirring music and gentle direction capture some soulful moments with a poetic undertow. Coming in to land, it offers a haunting reflection without overpowering audiences – a short film that speaks to the heart.
Goodbye Weekend
Goodbye Weekend is a dark comedy-drama and a riff on Weekend at Bernie’s. It tells the story of a man whose plans are disrupted when a stranger arrives unexpectedly at his airy, open-plan home. The protagonist’s Home Alone meets Risky Business weekend devolves into a nightmare as the arrival brings trouble – and soon, a corpse becomes a much bigger problem.
The contrast between the bright beach-house setting and the shadowy misadventure creates an interesting dynamic. From manic dancing to disturbing twists, Goodbye Weekend remains upbeat and constantly surprising. Through full-tilt performances and adventurous dialogue, this heightened short creates many memorable moments as it raises the stakes. A madcap caper with crime thriller undertones, there is much fun to be had in this entertaining and shocking hybrid short film.
F*Slur
F*Slur is a coming-of-age comedy-drama centred on a talent show where Dylan Petersen, a drag artist by the name of Shenequa van de Vetkoek, attempts to save face. After a video goes viral for all the wrong reasons, Dylan must redeem his drag persona by winning the national Mzansi Megastarz competition. It’s an inspired comedy anchored by an excellent performance from its lead actor, who goes full tilt in a spirited and often funny competition showdown.
This fun short film is full of spunk, with various contestants facing off in a schoolyard-style environment as things go down to the wire. Sharp lead acting, resourceful producing and spirited dialogue keep the energy high. F*Slur is a real crowd-pleaser that champions the underdog trying to steal the spotlight back and get one up on the competition.
Some films that deserve an honourable mention: The Rise of Aya, Heart Rot, Siren’s Call, My Eyes Are Brown in the Sun, Do Not Enter and Eros.
