Alma Film Festival Announces Official Selection Threads, Beats & Legends: Sesotho Alive
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Las Terrenas, Dominican Republic — The Alma Film Festival proudly announces the official selection of Threads, Beats & Legends: Sesotho Alive, a compelling cultural documentary from Lesotho that explores how a new generation of Basotho youth are preserving and reimagining their cultural heritage in a rapidly changing world.
Set against the dramatic landscapes and living traditions of the Mountain Kingdom of Lesotho, Threads, Beats & Legends: Sesotho Alive follows a vibrant community of young creatives who are reshaping the future of Sesotho culture through music, fashion, visual arts, film, and storytelling. The film captures how culture is carried forward through language, rhythms, clothing, rituals, and oral traditions passed down across generations.
Guided by historians, elders, and cultural knowledge-keepers, the documentary provides a rich exploration of Basotho identity and the symbols, stories, and practices that continue to shape society today. At the same time, the film highlights how youth artists are transforming ancestral traditions into contemporary forms — remixing heritage sounds into modern beats, integrating traditional textiles into innovative fashion, and translating ancient narratives into film and stage performance.
The result is a powerful portrait of cultural continuity and transformation.
At its heart, Threads, Beats & Legends: Sesotho Alive celebrates pride, resilience, and belonging, showing how a new generation is ensuring that Sesotho culture remains vibrant, visible, and deeply rooted in the future.
The film represents the growing creative energy emerging from Southern Africa and reflects the Alma Film Festival’s commitment to highlighting voices and stories from across the Global South.
The project is supported by key partners including SPACE AGENCY AFRICA, SNAKE NATION, and CAFI. The film is produced by Khotso “Jaden” Maphathe.
About the Alma Film Festival
The Alma Film Festival was created in response to structural gaps in the global film ecosystem. By design, it is a next-generation destination, experience-based film festival and cultural convening—one that functions as a cultural intelligence engine, bringing together filmmakers, scholars, technologists, artists, institutions, and audiences from across the Global South and its diasporas.
Rooted in scholarship, innovation, and deep audience engagement, Alma prioritizes fewer films with greater intentionality, creating space for meaningful dialogue, relationship-building, and long-term collaboration. With up to 80% of the program dedicated to Global South cinema, the festival showcases narrative features, documentaries, shorts, animation, experimental works, audio storytelling, and new media—centering films that engage cultural memory, social relevance, and creative innovation.
Programming is curated in partnership with global entities and agencies, reinforcing Alma’s role as a platform for shared authorship rather than extraction. Through this approach, the festival has cultivated a global community of stakeholders spanning more than 51 cities across 35 countries.
Beyond screenings, Alma integrates fellowships, symposia, performance laboratories, editorial platforms, and emerging technologies—positioning the festival not simply as an event, but as an ecosystem. Guided by the principle “The Necessity of Something New,” the Alma Film Festival advances cultural diplomacy, fosters cross-regional collaboration, and contributes to the development of sustainable creative economies worldwide.
At its core, the Alma Film Festival is a global gathering designed to nurture both ideas and people. It embraces a kaleidoscope of cultures while intentionally shifting the social dynamic from competition to connection—creating space for collaboration, understanding, and shared growth. Alma moves us from extraction to exchange, from visibility to value, and from presence to purpose.
We are doing something new.
There is a necessity for something new.
#AlmaFilmFestival
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