Simon Wood is an Emmy nominated filmmaker based in Cape Town, South Africa. Wood’s films have screened at the worlds largest film festivals and won numerous awards in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. In 2025 Wood is undertaking a fellowship at the MIT Open Documentary Lab which brings storytellers, technologists, and scholars together to advance the new arts of documentary.
In 2025, Wood co-created 'The Founder’s Pillars', a site-responsive AR memorial developed during his fellowship at MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. Created in collaboration with Meghna Singh and Lesiba Mabitsela, the project fuses colonial architecture with African futurist storytelling. Drawing on six regions of the continent, it animates textiles, myths, and freedom-making practices through AI-generated films, transforming institutional pillars into dynamic expressions of ancestral knowledge and decolonial memory. The Founder’s Pillars had its World Premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival and was later the recipient of a S+T+ARTS Prize Africa Award.
In 2024, Wood was awarded an Honourable Mention at the IDFA Forum Awards for 'The Four Floors of Faneuil' Hall, a quadriptych film co-directed with Dr. Meghna Singh. Currently in post-production, the project challenges the sanitised narrative of American history by simultaneously presenting the four levels of Boston’s iconic Faneuil Hall—a building hailed as the “Cradle of Liberty” yet founded by Peter Faneuil, a wealthy slave trader. Each panel focuses on a specific floor: the ground level, a bustling marketplace filled with patriotic souvenirs and snacks; the second floor, known as the Great Hall, where immigrants are sworn in as U.S. citizens; the third-floor attic, home to a military museum; and the basement, where a discreet slavery exhibit is tucked beside the public restrooms.
Wood’s film ‘Container’ World Premiered at the 78th Venice International Film Festival later screening at the Tribeca Film Festival 2022. A VR180 collaboration with Indian artist Meghna Singh, the project made history becoming the first VR film to be invited to screen at the Nobel Prize Giving Week in Sweden. Container makes visible the 'invisiblized' bodies enabling our consumer society. Confronting slavery and capitalism through an ever transforming shipping container, the past becomes the present, the invisible become visible.
In 2020, Wood was the recipient of the World Press Photo ‘Online Video of Year’ award for ‘Scenes from a Dry City'. The film was produced by Academy Award Winner Laura Poitras and Charlotte Cooke at Field of Vision. ‘Scenes from a Dry City’ premiered in competition at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) and had its U.S premiere in 2019 winning the Best Mini Doc at the Academy qualifying Big Sky Festival in Montana. In June 2019, the film was awarded an honourable mention by the American Film Institute at AFIDOCS. Since its premiere the film has screened at over fifty festivals, winning recognition from juries across the globe, culminating in Wood’s first Emmy nomination in August 2020 for Outstanding Short Documentary.
His previous film ‘The Silent Form’ won four awards including Best Documentary Short and Best Cinematography at the 2017 SAFTAS (South African Film and Television Awards). This capped a successful year for the film which had its world premiere in Toronto at Hot Docs. 'The Silent Form’ is a collaboration between Wood and one of South Africa’s most successful artists, the sculptor Dylan Lewis. Forging the artist and the filmmaker together as a mode of conceptual modelling, playing into the world of interpretations and reinterpretation, we witness a filmmaker visualising the sculptors work and in turn giving birth to a new creation.
This was the second year running that Wood had a film selected for Hot Docs following his 2015 film ‘Orbis’. Shot in twenty eight continuous days ‘Orbis’ is a hypnotic journey through one of South Africa’s largest townships, Umlazi, its inhabitants’ existence shaped by their proximity to Africa’s largest port, Durban. The port oversees material endlessly circling the globe, temporarily shaped as fridges, televisions, washing machines, ultimately destroyed, returned to its creator, reshaped into a new product. In 2018 ‘Orbis' was awarded The Golden Ribbon award for best international documentary by CCTV in Beijing .
Wood’s first film ‘Forerunners' was selected for IDFA in 2011: it’s an ancestral examination of four members of South Africa’s new black middle class as they delicately balance the traditional views of their childhood with the western consumerism that rules their professional lives, selecting and discarding elements from each world to forge a new legacy for their descendants. The film garnered awards in North America and Europe and was screened on Al Jazeera’s Witness strand.
Wood’s next feature documentary ‘Untamed’ is currently in post production was selected for the Final Cut at the Venice International Film Festival and IFP’s Spotlight on Documentaries for Independent Film Week in New York City.
FILMOGRAPHY
'The Founders Pillars' World Premiere at Tribeca Festival 2025. S+T+ARTS Prize Africa Award of Distinction. Screened at Artfinity - MIT's Festival of the Arts, Layers of Place - Augmented Reality Exhibition Beyond Monuments: Reclaiming Space through AR.
'The Four Floors of Faneuil Hall' Awarded an Honourable Mention at the IDFA Forum Awards 2024. Developed at the MIT Open Documentary Lab. Currently in Post Production.
‘Container’ 2021 World Premiere at the 78th Venice International Film Festival 2021. First VR Film to screen at Nobel Week Dialogue 2021 in Gothenburg. North American Premiere at The Tribeca Film Festival 2022. Screened at BFI London Film Festival 2021, Ji.hlava 2022, Verzio 2022, Kaohsiung Film Festival 2022, Beyond the Frame Festival 2022, Encounters 2022, Beijing International Film Festival 2023, Doc Edge New Zealand 2023, Exhibited at Oasis Immersion Montreal 2023, M+ Museum of Contemporary Visual Culture 2024, Maputo Fast Forward 2024,
‘Scenes from a Dry City’ World Press Photo 'Online Video of the Year' 2020, Emmy Nomination 'Outstanding Short Documentary', co directed with Francois Verster, produced by Laura Poitras and Charlotte Cooke at Field of Vision. Winner Best Mini Doc at The Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. 'Honourable Mention' at AFI DOCS 2019, Winner The Benedetto Senni Prize at Terra di Tutti Film Festival. Featured at IDFA 2018, Full Frame 2019, Hot Docs 2019, San Francisco International Film Festival 2019, Dallas International Film Festival 2019, Aspen Shorts 2019 and a 'Vimeo Staff Pick' after its online premiere.
‘The Silent Form’ World Premiere Hot Docs 2016, Winner of 4 South African Film and Television Awards (SAFTAS) including Best Documentary Short, Best Cinematography (Simon Wood), Best Editor and Best Sound Design
'Orbis’ International Premiere Hot Docs 2015, Winner ‘Golden Ribbon’ for Best International Short Documentary CCTV Beijing 2018, Winner 2 SAFTAS, Winner Golden Tree International Documentary Festival Best Documentary Short Frankfurt 2017, Screened at Vision du Reel 2017
'Forerunners' - IDFA 2011 (Best of the Fests), UNAFF San Francisco 2011, Winner Best Cinematography, Festival International Du Film Panafricain Cannes 2011 Jury Prize.
‘Untamed’ 2021 (Post Production) Selected for the Final Cut in Venice (75th Venice International Film Festival) . Also supported by the IFP (Spotlight on documentaries 2017) Received NFVF Post Production Grant in 2017
