Upcoming features from Guatemala’s Cesar Diaz and Sri Lanka’s Vimukthi Jayasundara, both winners of the Camera d’Or at Cannes, are among six co-productions to receive support from the Hubert Bals Fund.
The projects by filmmakers from Argentina, Egypt, Guatemala, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Yemen will each receive $60,800 (€60,000) from the International Film Festival Rotterdam‘s (IFFR) HBF+Europe: Minority Co-production Support scheme for 2022.
The projects will be awarded through their European co-producers in Austria, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands.
Jayasundara is the selection’s most prolific filmmaker and is supported for his latest feature, Turtle’s Gaze On Spying Stars, set on a mysterious resort where a man named Ananda must quarantine and reckon with his past on his return to Sri Lanka. France’s House On Fire produces. Jayasundara’s debut feature The Forsaken Land, also supported by the HBF, won the Camera d’Or in Cannes 2005.
Díaz, whose civil-war themed debut Nuestras madres won the Camera d’Or in 2019, is supported in this round for Fidelidad, the story of a love triangle set on Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. Lemming Film Belgium is the European producer.
Four of the selected projects are debut features, including Mongrel by Singaporean filmmaker Wei Liang Chiang. In his feature debut, an illegal Thai migrant gets caught up in a human trafficking operation, supposedly a care-giving scheme, in rural Taiwan. Paris-based Deuxième Ligne Films is on the Singapore-Taiwan-France co-production. His short and VR work has been shown in Berlin and Venice, and Mongrel has been developed at Cinéfondation Résidence, Talents Tokyo, and TorinoFilmLab, with development funds also from the HBF.
In The Station by Yemeni-Scottish filmmaker Sara Ishaq, the war in Yemen looms over a women-only petrol station, where the relationship between two sisters is pushed to breaking point amid a fuel crisis. The project’s development was previously supported by the HBF, and it was presented at IFFR’s co-production market in 2020 where it won the Wouter Barendrecht Award. Amsterdam’s Keplerfilm is producing.
A reformed gang of hard-boiled thieves are the stars of La Escuela Pesada, the latest project from Argentinian filmmaker Hernán Rosselli whose social-realist take on a Buenos Aires hustler, Mauro, screened at IFFR 2015. Vienna and Buenos Aires-based Nabis Filmgroup will receive the funds.
Mohamed Rashad explores labour abuses in Egypt in The Settlement, where the sons of a father who dies in a blade factory struggle for compensation. The project was presented at CineMart in 2021 as part of the BoostNL programme. Paris-based Caractères Productions is on board the Egypt-France-Germany co-production.
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