IFFR: Hubert Bals Fund Announces New Projects

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.

Source: IFFR

Images: Festival Scope