Bare Feet opens with a dare printed right on its own poster: when all you have are your bare feet, you use them. That is also the shape of the film itself, a coming-of-age story about two Ghanaian boys chasing a future in football with nothing else to work with.
Now, that premise has real news behind it.
Bare Feet has been selected for the Fiction Features strand of Talents Durban 2026, the 19th edition of one of the continent’s most established filmmaker development programmes.
The film is being built collaboratively with writer-producer Lawrencia Aphua Larbi-Amoah and director-producer Nana Kofi Asihene, the same pairing behind the earlier feature TWO. It is produced by Bravado Films in association with Apstairs Media.
The programme itself has run under the Durban FilmMart Institute since 2019, as the continent’s associated arm of Berlinale Talents, the training wing of the Berlin International Film Festival. This year’s edition drew a record 551 applications. Per Afrocritik’s reporting, 25 participants and six film critics were selected from 17 African countries, across labs for fiction, documentary, animation, and a new peer-to-peer newsroom track. Ghanaian filmmakers Akosua Adoma Owusu and Comfort Arthur are among this year’s mentors.
Talents Durban runs alongside the Durban FilmMart itself, October 9 to 12 in Durban, South Africa, as a track separate from the event’s dedicated pitch and financing forum. Bare Feet’s placement is in the mentorship and lab side of the programme, not the financing one, which means this October is about sharpening the project, not selling it.
For two boys whose only asset is their own feet, that’s not a bad place to start.
