At the European Film Festival South Africa, three films trace how fatherhood bends under social and political collapse, exploring absent fathers, surrogate kinship and fragile belonging across nations.
In 2023, a reported 35.6% of South African children lived with their biological fathers in the same household. A total of 40.3% lived with men who were not their biological fathers.
These figures were published in the third and latest State of South Africa's Fathers report in 2024. But fathers, and consequently the various states of fatherhood, are not unique to South Africa.
No relationship - no parenting or family dynamic - exists in a vacuum. They brush up against their societal and political environments, and not without collisions.
This reality comes to the fore in the curation of the 2026 European Film Festival South Africa , where the theme is families: "The families we're born into, the families we create, the histories we carry, and the connections that shape who we become."
While the programme showcases titles from several countries exploring a range of family structures - from young motherhood in Belgium and children of divorced parents in the Netherlands to a quest for an...