Out Of Africa: Ivorian-American Filmmaker Dominic Yarabe Wins 2026 Locarno Residency
The Locarno Residency, a year-long screenwriting and development programme for directors preparing their first feature films, recently announced the winners of its 2026 edition, with Ivorian-American filmmaker Dominic Yarabe clinching one of three spots. Yarabe, along with Brazilian-American filmmaker Julia Mellen and Swiss-Italian filmmaker Anna Simonetti, were chosen from 12 finalists during the recently concluded […]
Black News 
The Locarno Residency, a year-long screenwriting and development programme for directors preparing their first feature films, recently announced the winners of its 2026 edition, with Ivorian-American filmmaker Dominic Yarabe clinching one of three spots.
Yarabe, along with Brazilian-American filmmaker Julia Mellen and Swiss-Italian filmmaker Anna Simonetti, were chosen from 12 finalists during the recently concluded 79th Locarno Film Festival.
Yarabe’s films have screened at Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, True/False Film Fest and other festivals, museums and cultural institutions internationally. She is a Harvard Film Study Center Fellow, MacDowell Fellow and a Duke Center for Documentary Studies DocX Residency Fellow. Yarabe received her MFA in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University and is currently a PhD candidate in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.
Yarabe emerges as one of this year’s winners for her project Feu de Lune, set in the rural Ivorian village of Bobia. The film explores the lingering memory of a largely erased civil war across three generations, revealing how its history continues to live through the dreams of children, the silences of adults and the bedtime stories passed down by a mother.
The Locarno Residency aims to offer support and guidance through what is an important rite of passage for many filmmakers: their first feature. Yarabe, Mellen and Simonetti will participate in a year-long mentoring course, which consists of online and in-person sessions. The first in-person session will take place in winter in Italy. The second phase will follow in spring in Arles, in collaboration with the LUMA Foundation, with participants hosted in the Parc des Ateliers.
