International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR)’s Hubert Bals Fund (HBF) has selected ten feature film projects for its 2023 Script and Project Development Support scheme.
The ten projects, which will receive a grant of €10,000 to support their development, were selected from more than 760 applications. The fund aims to support new and diverse voices from across the globe, mainly backing those on their debut or second fiction feature projects.
Filipino director Martika Ramirez Escobar follows her Sundance-winning Leonor Will Never Die (2022) with Daughters Of The Sea, three stories featuring a fisherman’s daughter, a dying mermaid and a documentary filmmaker.
Brazilian filmmaker Leonardo Martinelli’s Fantasma Neon is the follow-up to the short of the same name which had its premiere at Locarno where it won the short film Pardo d’oro.
Self-taught Vietnamese filmmaker Le Bao’s The Sea Is Calm Tonight is a follow-up to the Berlinale Encounters jury prize-winning Taste (2021), about a meeting at sea between the spirits of Vietnamese boat people and Rohingya refugees.
Two projects are supported from the African continent. Ghanaian filmmaker Nuotama Frances Bodomo’s Afronauts focuses on the true but forgotten events of the Zambian space programme based on her short of the same name that screened at IFFR 2017.
Senegalese-French filmmaker Katy Léna Ndiaye debut Lënd is a story that touches on the climate crisis, centring on rising waters threatening a fishing neighbourhood as a family battles to preserve their way of life.
Ana Elena Tejera’s Corte Culebra addresses the ancestral trauma of the communities displaced on Gatun Lake, the artificial heart of the Panama Canal. Her first feature, the film poem Panquiaco, had its world premiere at IFFR 2020.
Another of the filmmakers in the selection to have screened their work at IFFR is Shengze Zhu, whose Present.Perfect. competed in the Tiger Competition at IFFR 2019. Her fiction debut A Distant House Smokes On The Horizon centres on juvenile murder cases in China.
Lipika Singh Darai’s short Night And Fear was in competition at IFFR 2023, and she follows up with her feature debut Birdwoman, to be produced in the Odia language from the state of Odisha in India.
Omer Capoglu’s I Recognized Him by His Hands is billed as a humorous but heartfelt take on the Turkish culture around martyrdom. The producer of the project, Nadir Öperli, was behind IFFR 2023 Limelight title Burning Days.
Egyptian filmmaker Nada Riyadh’s feature fiction debut Moonblind centres on non-binary Badr reckoning with their escape from a sexually abusive father.
“In these complex times, when uncertainty seems to reign, the significance of impactful storytelling becomes even more pronounced,” said the HBF’s incoming head Tamara Tatishvili. “In the midst of a fiercely competitive round and guided by the diligent efforts of the HBF selection committees, I am delighted to extend a hand of companionship to the creative teams that’s about more than just financial backing. This stage of filmmaking is where stories are conceived, ideas take flight, and the very essence of a film is defined.”
Hubert Bals Fund Script and Project Development Support 2023
- Afronauts, dir. Nuotama Frances Bodomo (Zambia-US)
- Birdwoman, dir. Lipika Singh Darai (India)
- Corte Culebra, dir. Ana Elena Tejera (Panama)
- Daughters Of The Sea, dir. Martika Ramirez Escobar (Phil-Sp-Braz)
- A Distant House Smokes On The Horizon, dir. Shengze Zhu (China-US)
- Fantasma Neon, dir. Leonardo Martinelli (Brazil)
- I Recognized Him By His Hands, dir. Omer Capoglu (Turkey)
- Lënd, dir. Katy Léna Ndiaye (Sen-Bel-Fr)
- Moonblind, dir. Nada Riyadh (Egypt)
- The Sea Is Calm Tonight, dir. Le Bao (Sing-Viet)
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