By TRH Entertainment Desk
‘The Ones With the Tempered Flowers’ Will Document a Woman Studying Her Body’s Relationship to Self and Society in Tanzania
Mumbai, August 17, 2026 — Tanzanian director Neema Ngelime is developing her feature documentary debut, an essayistic, deeply personal project called The Ones With the Tempered Flowers.
The film was among the works-in-progress showcased at the 2026 edition of Locarno Open Doors, the Locarno Film Festival’s industry platform dedicated to African cinema, where it picked up two honors: the ArteKino International Award and the Sørfond Award.
The documentary follows Ngelime as she examines her own body’s relationship to self, society and family expectation in Tanzania, using staged reenactments with her relatives alongside personal archival material.
As one Locarno description put it, the film centers on a woman studying “her body’s relationship to self, society and the political weight placed on women’s bodies” in her country.
Ngelime stages performances with her own family, restaging fragments of shared history — moments her relatives believe are fiction but which are, in fact, real memories reworked into a new form.
The film’s structure spans three timeframes: Ngelime’s 1990s Tanzanian childhood, her present-day reality, and an imagined future, rendered through a mix of constructed archives, observational footage, family performances, stop-motion and visual effects.
In her director’s note, Ngelime traced the project’s origin to a diagnosis of fibroids — a condition, she said, that society often attributes to “unused” womanhood.
“Growing up felt like watching the women I loved fade into mysteries,” she wrote, adding that she now fears “becoming a mystery too, lost to the weight of expectations.”
She described the film as a way of channelling grief over how little she knew of the women in her life before they became mothers or wives, and of exploring “how families shape dreams, identity and autonomy.”
A Tanzania-Kenya Co-Production
The film is produced by Ivy Kiru of Kenya’s LBx Africa. Speaking about the project’s cross-border resonance, Kiru said the overlap between the two countries’ realities became clear early on: “Tanzania and Kenya, we are really similar,” she said, describing both as existing within “a patriarchal world society in general,” where women reach a certain age and inevitably face the same conversations regardless of where they’re from.
The project is currently in late development, with roughly €90,000 of its €400,000 total budget secured so far, and is now seeking European broadcasters and additional financing partners. The Sørfond Award will send the team to pitch at the Sørfond Pitching Forum in Norway in November 2026.
Part of a Bigger Wave
The film was one of several standout projects at this year’s Open Doors Africa-focused cycle, which also recognized Ugandan absurdist drama A Vineyard for a Lobster, Somali social thriller Accept My Plea for Burial, and Ghanaian music documentary Too Much Music. Locarno’s Open Doors head, Zsuzsi Bánkuti, framed the broader push behind the selections as an effort to keep expanding who gets to tell these stories — and how — with a particular emphasis on amplifying female voices both behind the camera and in the producer’s chair.
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