International Film Festival Rotterdam's Hubert Bals Fund has selected 12 feature films to each receive a Development Support grant of €10,000. Diverse yet united in their common effort to remain vocal, the filmmakers of this funding wave extend across a variety of unique and creative styles. Tamara Tatishvili, Head of the HBF said: "This wave of grant recipient filmmakers each come from a different context but share a common approach—they do not remain silent or give in to despair amid the challenges of our current times. Instead they stay active, speak up, and make their voices heard through their stories and artistry. The filmmakers selected for the grants are just a fraction of those who submitted for consideration, making this an incredibly challenging round".
Brazilian filmmaker Lillah Halla is one of a number of filmmakers with an IFFR history who are supported in this round of funding. Her new project Colhões de Ouro is a dark musical comedy centring on Krista Bomb, an 85-year-old radical who plans to infiltrate and destroy a hyper-masculine cult to save her son. Kenyan filmmaker Angela Wanjiku Wamai's epic neo-Western Enkop (The Soil) sets the story of 55-year-old Lorna Marwa on the dusty expanses of Kenya's volatile ranch land. Kiss Wagon (pictured above) director Midhun Murali's next project, MTV i.e. Mars to Venus, is a similarly inventive feature that combines four different genres. Muayad Alayan's Conversation with the Sea follows a Palestinian man from Jerusalem who is ordered by an Israeli court to pay a debt owed by his late son.
Christopher Murray's Piedras gigantes tells the story of the archaeologist Katherine Routledge arriving on Easter Island in 1914. In Una Gunjak's road movie How Melissa Blew a Fuse, Melissa steals €200k from her workplace in Germany, buys a car, puts on music and heads towards her home town in Bosnia. Indonesian filmmaker Kamila Andini is supported for Four Seasons in Java, about a woman's journey to find peace after being wrongly convicted of murdering a young man. The short Notes of a Crocodile by Cambodian filmmaker Daphne Xu is now the basis for a feature of the same name; the HBF backs this docufiction hybrid project, which weaves myth, queer desire and politics against the Chinese development of a canal project in Cambodia.
Belarus is the setting for a dark sci-fi comedy touching on the immigrant experience in Darya Zhuk's Exactly What It Seems. In Falso positivo, Theo Montoya approaches the 'false positives' murders in Colombia, where civilians were killed by the military and falsely passed off as enemy combatants, to sculpt a narrative on the falsification of reality. Georgian filmmaker Elene Mikaberidze's documentary Blueberry Dreams (pictured above) had its world premiere earlier this year, and she's supported for her debut fiction feature Le goût de la pêche, which focuses on a young woman caught in escalating geopolitical tensions. Kasım Ördek's feature debut Goodbye for Now follows Sevgi, who is drawn into a dangerous search after her mother's mysterious disappearance.
Four Focus programmes at IFFR 2025 will celebrate the contributions of underappreciated filmmakers and revisit historical and cultural legacies, with the strands highlighting documentary filmmaker Katja Raganelli; Ukranian director Sergii Masloboishchykov; the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference; and VHS culture. The first titles in the programmes include world premieres of Alex Ross Perry's Videoheaven and Rotterdam filmmaker Gyz La Rivière’s Videotheek Marco.
Perry’s documentary Videoheaven (pictured above), which chronicles the history of video stores in Hollywood cinema, anchors Hold Video in Your Hands, a Focus programme celebrating the community spirit of VHS culture. This programme examines the interplay of private and public film cultures. Rotterdam filmmaker La Rivière returns to the festival with his ode to the video store Videotheek Marco (pictured below), an investigation into local video store history and connected audiovisual activities like community television.
As conversations evolve around streaming platforms and their impact on cinematic viewing practices, IFFR presents a timely exploration of VHS culture deeply rooted in community, creativity and unique viewing practices. This diverse programme includes film screenings ranging from the 2011 Indian documentary Videokaaran to David Cronenberg’s latest, The Shrouds (pictured top), as well as interactive projects inviting Rotterdam citizens to share their personal home video stories, creating a communal cinematic experience.
Irish Film and Television UK (IFTUK) will bring its annual festival to the heart of London from November 13 to 17, unveiling a line-up that celebrates the very best in Irish filmmaking. Taking place at Vue West End, Vue Piccadilly and the ICA, Irish Film Festival London will showcase a mix of feature narrative, documentaries and short films shedding fresh light on the country’s culturally dynamic past, present and future.
The festival opens with Aoife Kelleher’s feature documentary Mrs Robinson, an illuminating portrait of Ireland’s first female president Mary Robinson. With extraordinary access, the film reveals a singularly influential force whose gift for bridging differences was instrumental in bringing about seismic change in Ireland. Mrs Robinson pays tribute to a woman who remains actively committed to peace, justice, and human rights to this day.
From the highest echelons of Irish politics to the grit of the land itself, the festival is set to close with Christopher Andrews’ visceral feature debut Bring Them Down, a thriller set on a farm starring Barry Keoghan (Saltburn, Bird), Christopher Abbott and Colm Meaney. Shot in Wicklow, this Belgian co-production stunningly evokes rural Ireland through a nail-biting story of feuding shepherds, marking Andrews as an exciting name to watch.
As well as spotlighting new talent, the festival will celebrate the 40th anniversary of Neil Jordan’s hugely influential classic The Company of Wolves (pictured above and top), with an exclusive screening followed by a Q&A with the director. A cinematic breakthrough on its release in 1984, this unsettling Freudian fantasy, co-written with renowned author Angela Carter, is still lauded for its astonishing use of non-digital practical effects.
The 68th BFI London Film Festival closed on Sunday 20th October with the European Premiere of Morgan Neville’s Piece by Piece (pictured above), a vibrant journey through the life of cultural icon Pharrell Williams, all told through the lens of LEGO animation. In addition to Neville and Williams, the event was attended by an exciting array of special guests from the worlds of music, fashion and sport. The Closing Night Gala took place at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, which returned as the festival’s Headline Gala and Special Presentation venue for a fourth time since its inaugural year in 2021.
Placing audiences at the heart of the festival, the winners of this year’s LFF Audience Awards, as chosen by members of the public, were announced yesterday. Darren Thornton’s funny and heartwarming comedy drama Four Mothers, about one Irish son juggling four very different mothers, took the Audience Award for Best Feature; Holloway, which follows six women who were formerly incarcerated at what was once the largest women’s prison in Europe, was the winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary; and Two Minutes won the Audience Award for Best Short Film.
The 68th edition welcomed more than 815 international and UK filmmakers, immersive art and extended reality artists and series creatives to present their work at venues across the capital. The festival kicked off with a press conference for the world premiere of Opening Night Film Blitz led by Steve McQueen. The festival’s highly anticipated series of Screen Talks included acclaimed filmmakers Andrea Arnold, Sean Baker, Mike Leigh, Denis Villeneuve, remarkable acting talents Lupita Nyong’o and Zoe Saldaña (star of Jacques Audiard's Emilia Pérez, pictured below), as well as the versatile Daniel Kaluuya.
The festival featured an exciting range of 252 titles (comprising features, shorts, series and immersive works) hailing from 79 countries, and featured 63 languages. All features and series screened to UK audiences for the first time, including 38 World Premieres, 12 International Premieres (6 features, 4 shorts, 2 immersive) and 21 European Premieres (17 features, 1 series, 3 shorts). Across the programme, including events for industry delegates and the immensely popular LFF for Free programme, the festival had 230,342 attendances, the highest in-person attendance in the last ten years.
International Film Festival Rotterdam's Hubert Bals Fund has announced the four projects each awarded a grant of €60,000 through the HBF+Europe: Post-production Support scheme. The awards, sponsored by Creative Europe MEDIA, offer support for the final stages of European co-productions with filmmakers from regions where the Hubert Bals Fund targets its support. Filmmakers from Georgia, Nepal, Peru and South Africa are supported through co-producers in Luxembourg, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands respectively. The diverse projects range from a 16mm inquiry into coloniality to a revenge noir.
Georgian filmmaker Rati Oneli’s feature fiction debut Wild Dogs Don’t Bite follows his observational documentary on a derelict mining town City of the Sun, which premiered in the Berlinale Forum in 2017. Dealing in the winners and losers of post-Soviet Georgia, the film is a noir-inspired revenge thriller. Nepalese filmmaker Sahara Sharma’s film My Share of the Sky is a search for the elusive dream of home in a patriarchal society, as a young woman grapples with uncertainty on the eve of her wedding. Sharma was the first female director to open the Kathmandu IMFF with her debut Chasing Rainbows.
The selection moves into the realm of experimental storytelling with Estados generales by Peruvian filmmaker Mauricio Freyre, whose current project is a 16mm film that reimagines the voyage of a parcel of seeds from Madrid back to the place where they were picked in Peru. Fresh from the premiere of their Afrikaans-language drama Carissa in Venice earlier this year, Devon Delmar and Jason Jacobs are supported for Variations on a Theme. Like the former, the project is rooted in the rural experience, blending the magical world and the mundane on the margins between fiction and documentary.
