Film Festival

WHAT IS THE LOVEBOX EXPERIENCE? The Lovebox Experience begins at AfrikaBurn, the largest regional event inspired by Burning Man — a temporary city in the South African desert where money, routine and competition seem to fall away, and another way of being together suddenly feels possible. At the heart of it is the Lovebox: a converted horse trailer, part art project, part small spacecraft, built for human encounters of a different kind. Two strangers step inside, sit face to face and leave the outside world behind for a few minutes. What starts as a playful experiment slowly becomes something deeper. In the quiet of the Lovebox, closeness is not a romantic ideal, but a challenge — an encounter with another person, and often with oneself. When the Lovebox leaves the desert and travels through South Africa, the questions become more complex. People who might never meet in everyday life suddenly sit opposite each other. Their differences do not disappear, nor do the histories and boundaries between them. But for a brief moment, another kind of space opens — shaped by presence, vulnerability and the fragile possibility of being seen. The Lovebox Experience is an intimate documentary about love, vulnerability and human connection — and about the radical possibility of truly meeting one another in a divided world. Now in cinemas across Germany Find one here: https://www.kinoheld.de/film/lovebox

We’re pleased to invite you to join us for the first AfrikaBurn Film Festival. While AfrikaBurn may inspire you to quit your job as a lawyer and build art in the middle of the desert, it also inspires filmmakers from around the world to undertake the ‘you must be nuts’ process of creating moving art that lives beyond the Binnekring and on a cinema screen. This film festival celebrates the artists and creatives who are brave enough to venture into Tankwa Town, including those who are armed with nothing but a camera and a media pass. Both main feature films will be preceded by other AfrikaBurn short films … made by you!

In 2023, the Lovebox Experience landed at AfrikaBurn, part spaceship, part art project, resulting in an intimate documentary about love, vulnerability, human connection, and the radical possibility of truly meeting one another in a divided world. Whether or not you took part in this experiment yourself, you’ll be fascinated to see how the Lovebox shows our openness to others and the different ways we are all seen.

In 2024, inspired by his experience the previous year as a participant at AfrikaBurn, Rob Dos Santos and his team decided to do something that had never been done before: to make a scripted feature film … during the event, with a spontaneous mix of actors and volunteer participants. This Is How The World Ends was written after Rob’s first AfrikaBurn, and this film is the amazing result. Rob’s story is as much a triumph of filmmaking as it is of creativity in the desert … with no room for retakes when you’re trying to film in a Karoo sandstorm