Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh and Palestine 36 director Annemarie Jacir are among the five recipients of the second Displacement Film Fund (DFF), the short film scheme backed by Cate Blanchett and the Rotterdam Film Festival (IFFR).
The fund champions filmmakers who have been displaced or whose work often centres on narratives of displacement. Each of the five recipients will receive a €100,000 production grant to complete a short film which will world premiere at the IFFR in 2027.
The recipients were announced during a panel at Cannes featuring four of the directors, Blanchett and IFFR managing director Clare Stewart.
Joining Panh and Jacir are Palestinian-US filmmaker and comedian Mohammed Amer, who stars in Netflix series Mo; South Sudanese director Akuol de Mabior, whose 2022 short No Simple Way Home premiered at Berlin; and Vietnamese-US filmmaker Bao Nguyen, whose documentary The Stringer was nominated for four Emmys.
Last year’s recipients included Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof and Ukrainian filmmaker Maryna Er Gorbach. Reflecting on the reaction to their short films at IFFR earlier this year, Blanchett said: “We could not have hoped for a better reaction which just really underscored for me the fact that this very, very polarising rhetoric that we get, the window-sized rhetoric that we get around these issues, these stories, these people, these lives, is really not true, because the audiences [for the films] just exploded.
“The conversation in the foyer afterwards was so engaged and heartfelt, and what was interesting, I think, for all of us involved was that each of the films stood with their own merit as individual works of cinema, but when we saw them together as a cohort, they had a super power.”
This year’s recipients were selected by a committee chaired by Blanchett and included filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen, IFFR festival director Vanja Kaludjercic, and UK producer Barbara Broccoli.
For the second edition of the fund, IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund returns as management partner, Amahoro Coalition, Droom en Daad, Master Mind, the Tamer Family Foundation and UNIQLO return as founding partners, and UNHCR – the UN Refugee Agency – remains strategic partner. The SP Lohia Foundation joins as a new major partner.
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