Indian director Payal Kapadia’s festival favourite All We Imagine As Light is one of the many films backed at an early stage by the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund (HBF).
Underlining HBF’s reach, Wei Liang Chiang and You Qiao Yin’s Cannes Camera d’Or winner Mongrel, Palestinian-Danish filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel’s To a Land Unknown, Trương Minh Quý’s Viet and Nam and Wang Bing’s Youth (Hard Times) and Youth (Homecoming) were other 2024 festival titles to receive development support from the fund.
At a time when industry finance is ever tighter, HBF has received a welcome boost this year, receiving additional funding from private and institutional backers.
Susan Weeks, founder and former board chair of the US-based Global Film Initiative, made a private donation to HBF that allows it to provide a further two grants for its HBF’s annual development support scheme, taking the number to 12 projects backed with a total of €120,000.
Additionally, the Netherlands Film Fund is also boosting its support for HBF. From 2025, the NFF+HBF Co-Production Scheme will back 10 projects at the development stage – up from four in 2024.
Tamara Tatishvili, who took over as HBF head in January 2024, believes donors respond to the Fund’s remit.
”Susan [Weeks] really appreciated the effort and the direction of travel we set out this year, and with her support, we have been able to add two more development grants,” says Tatishvili, who was previously head of studies at Medici, the training and exchange forum for international public film funds, and a former director of the Georgian National Film Center.
Funding rise
Over the past year, HBF has supported 29 projects (from 1,245 applications) with a total of €1.2m across its four different funding streams.
Tatishvili stresses the importance of HBF’s mandate. Founded in 1988 and named after the first director of the IFFR, the idea behind the Hubert Bals Fund was to help filmmakers - mainly from what was then called the Third World - to get their film projects off the ground.
Today, HBF support projects by filmmakers from countries where local film funding, infrastructure or freedom of expression is lacking or restrictive. In practice this has meant it largely funds projects from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and parts of Eastern Europe.
Tatishvili has been consulting the industry about the Fund, to “test its mandate and mission”. She has concluded the “risk funding” HBF provides in the form of development support makes it more relevant than ever.
“It gives filmmakers a chance to develop their storyline and project at the moments when the majority of funders are not able to do that,” she says.
The fund’s mandate to support filmmakers in territories where freedom of expression or infrastructure is limited remains relevant too.
Looking ahead, Tatishvili wants to “balance” HBF so that it not only supports young talent, but also helps to support the career development of the fund’s alumni. She explains the fund’s DNA will remain in discovering and supporting new talent, but “we’re also happy to celebrate the talent who we already have a very strong investment in”.
She points out HBF is not just for backing films in territories such as Latin America and Asia, where it has traditionally had a strong presence, but in Europe too. For example, HBF’s most recent round of development support included funding for Belarus-born Darya Zhuk’s Exactly What it Seems and Bosnian filmmaker Una Gunjak’s How Melissa Blew a Fuse.
HBF’s support for European projects can also be seen in its HBF+Europe: Minority Co-production Support scheme, which last year backed seven projects with €420,000 in total in low-capacity production countries. This is more focused on production and post-production funding.
Some films will receive development funding from HBF and go on to be selected for IFFR’s CineMart co-production market or work in progress strand Darkroom. This year, four HBF-backed filmmakers will present their projects at Cinemart, and three at Darkroom. There is no obligation for HBF funded films to premiere in Rotterdam, though.
The prime consideration of HBF selection committees are the artistic qualities of applications. Tatishvili underlines they are “open-minded” when assessing applications: it is not just for social cinema from, say, Latin America, or dark projects from the former Yugoslavia.
She cites recently backed projects such as Brazilian filmmaker Lillah Halla’s dark musical comedy Colhões De Ouro or Kenyan filmmaker Angela Wanjiku Wamai’s neo-Western Enkop (The Soil). Georgian filmmaker Elene Mikaberidze’s Le Goût De La Pêche, meanwhile, addresses the geopolitical tensions of the region but displays “the humour that is always very present in Georgian cinema”.
Meanwhile, HBF has just launched the Displacement Film Fund together with actress Cate Blanchett, a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations’ refugee UNHCR. This pilot short film scheme will offer five individual production grants worth €500,000 in total to fund the work of displaced filmmakers or filmmakers with a track record of storytelling on the experiences of displaced people.
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