The Spike Lee apartheid animated film Tribeca 2026 has been building towards has a world premiere date. APART, a 12-minute animated short written by Lee and directed by South African visual artist Pola Maneli, screens for the first time on Saturday, 6 June 2026 at 14:30 at the Tribeca Festival in New York City. Tickets are available through the Tribeca Festival’s official website.
The film follows Themba and Joel, two young boys whose friendship becomes an act of quiet resistance against an apartheid system designed to keep them separated.
The production is technically ambitious by any short-film standard: 266 creatives worked across 18,000 individual frames, with 157 of those being specialist animation artists.
Four distinct techniques were employed simultaneously, covering traditional 2D, cut-out, 3D and 2.5D animation, giving APART a visually layered identity that reportedly mirrors the fractured, contested reality of apartheid-era South Africa itself.
What to expect from APART
Despite carrying Spike Lee’s name up front, this is a deeply South African project. Pola Maneli, a Johannesburg-born visual artist, directs. His work has appeared on the cover of The New Yorker and in the permanent collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC.
The film’s music is supervised by Black Coffee, the Grammy Award-winning South African DJ and record producer. Wardrobe design belongs to Laduma Ngxokolo, founder of MaXhosa Africa, one of the most recognisable South African fashion labels on the international stage.
The creative framework around the story is what makes APART more than a straightforward apartheid narrative. The forbidden friendship between Themba and Joel sits inside a larger interrogation of what apartheid did to ordinary childhood, told through animation that, blends four distinct visual styles into a single cohesive work.
That technical ambition reflects how seriously both Lee and Maneli appear to have taken the material.
Spike Lee apartheid animated film Tribeca 2026 tickets and screening
The world premiere is on Saturday, 6 June 2026 at 14:30 at the Tribeca Festival in New York City. Festival tickets are available through the Tribeca Festival website.
The festival runs annually across multiple venues in lower Manhattan each June.
There is no confirmed South African release date or streaming platform for APART at this stage. Given the scale of South African talent involved, Maneli’s direction, Black Coffee’s music supervision and Ngxokolo’s wardrobe design, the film’s distribution plans after Tribeca are the next development worth watching.
