International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR)’s Hubert Bals Fund (HBF) has selected 12 feature film projects for its 2024 Development Support sch
International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR)’s Hubert Bals Fund (HBF) has selected 12 feature film projects for its 2024 Development Support scheme.
The 12 projects, which will receive a grant of €10,000 to support their development, were selected from a record 1,150 submissions.
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They include Christopher Murray’s Piedras Gigantes which will be among the first Chilean national fiction feature films shot on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the remote Pacific Ocean island.
Piedras Gigantes tells the story of the archaeologist Katherine Routledge arriving on the island in 1914, who played a conflicted role amidst an indigenous uprising. Murray’s The Blind Christ premiered in competition at Venice in 2016, while his Hubert Bals supported Sorcery (Brujería) premiered at Sundance 2023.
Palestinian filmmaker Muayad Alayan’s Conversation with the Sea is also one of the selected projects. His films have screened at IFFR on several occasions including the HBF-backed The Reports on Sarah and Saleem in 2018 and A House in Jerusalem in 2023. Conversation with the Sea is a love story about family, following a Palestinian man from Jerusalem who is ordered by an Israeli court to pay a debt owed by his son who died as a teenager 20 years ago.
Meanwhile, Kenyan filmmaker Angela Wanjiku Wamai’s neo-Western Enkop (The Soil) is the story of fifty-five-year-old woman’s fight to reclaim her life on the dusty expanses of Kenya’s volatile ranch land. Wamai’s previous feature Shimoni had its European premiere at IFFR 2023 and premiered at Toronto’s Discovery section in 2022.
Una Gunjak’s road movie How Melissa Blew a Fuse is about a woman who steals €200k from her workplace in Germany, buys a car, puts on music and heads towards her home town in Bosnia. Gunjak’s debut Excursion was HBF-supported and received a Special Mention in Cineasti del Presente at Locarno 2023.
Indonesian filmmaker Kamila Andini is supported for Four Seasons in Java, about a woman’s journey in finding peace after being wrongly convicted of murdering a juvenile man. She was previously supported by the HBF for The Seen and Unseen, which had its world premiere in the TIFF Wavelengths strand in 2018. Recently, Andini won the best director prize at the Asia Content Awards alongside Ifa Isfansyah for Netflix Indonesia series Cigarette Girl, the streamer’s first period drama in the country.
Brazilian filmmaker Lillah Hallah, whose Levante won the Youth Jury Award at IFFR 2024, is supported for her fresh project Colhões de Ouro, a murky musical comedy about an 85-year-old radical who plans to infiltrate and destroy a hyper-masculine cult to save her son.
Midhun Murali won a Tiger Special Jury Award at IFFR 2024 for the mixed-media fantasy Kiss Wagon. His next project, MTV i.e. Mars to Venus combines four different genres as part of a protagonist’s cinematic experiment.
Theo Montoya is supported for Falso Positivo about civilians killed by the military in Columbia and falsely passed off as enemy combatants, creating a narrative on the falsification of reality. Montoya’s debut feature Anhell69 world premiered in Vencie’s International Critics’ Week in 2022.
Georgian filmmaker Elene Mikaberidze follows up her documentary Blueberry Dreams, which had its world premiere at CPH:DOX earlier this year, with her fiction feature debut, Le goût de la pêche, about a juvenile woman who runs a guesthouse caught in escalating geopolitical tensions.
The compact Notes of a Crocodile by Cambodian filmmaker Daphne Xu had its world premiere at Toronto this year, and is now the basis for a feature of the same name. The docufiction hybrid project weaves myth, queer desire and development politics against the Chinese development of a canal project in Cambodia.
Kasım Ördek’s feature debut follows Sevgi who, living with a gang on the margins of Istanbul, is drawn into a unsafe search after her mother’s mysterious disappearance. His previous compact Together, Alone screened at the Sarajevo and Chicago film festivals.
Belarus is the setting for Darya Zhuk’s murky sci-fi comedy Exactly What It Seems about two immigrants to the US unwillingly transported back to Belarus by a secretive government teleportation technology.
Previous recipients of the grants include Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light and Baby by Marcelo Caetano in Cannes, Tato Kotetishvili’s Holy Electricity in Locarno, and To a Land Unknown by Mahdi Fleifel in Thessaloniki.
Tamara Tatishvili, head of the Hubert Bals Fund 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 into despair amid the challenges of our current times. Instead they stay active, speak up, and make their voices heard through their stories and artistry.”
Hubert Bals Development Support 2024
Colhões de Ouro (Braz-Ger)
Dir Lillah Halla
Conversation With The Sea (Pal)
Dir Muayad Alayan
Enkop (The Soil) (Ken)
Dir Angela Wanjiku Wamai
Exactly What It Seems (Est-Pol)
Dir Darya Zhuk
Falso Positivo (Col-Rom)
Dir Theo Montoya
Four Seasons In Java (Indonesia)
Dir Kamila Andini
Goodbye for Now (Turkey)
Dir Kasım Ördek
Le Goût de la Pêche (Georgia)
Dir Elene Mikaberidze
How Melissa Blew a Fuse (Bos & Her-Ger-Cro-Ser)
Dir Una Gunjak
MTV i.e. Mars to Venus (India)
Dir Midhun Murali
Notes of a Crocodile (Cam-China-Can)
Dir Daphne Xu
Piedras Gigantes (Chile)
Dir Christopher Murray
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