Four projects awarded with HBF+Europe: Post-production Support

The Hubert Bals Fund announces the four projects each awarded a grant of €60,000 each through HBF+Europe: Post-production Support scheme. The awards, sponsored by Creative Europe MEDIA, offer support for the final stages of European co-productions with filmmakers from regions where the HBF targets its support. 

Filmmakers from Georgia, Nepal, Peru and South Africa are supported through co-producers in Luxembourg, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands respectively. The projects range from the magical rural mundane, a 16mm inquiry into coloniality through botany, revenge noir and the search for belonging. 

Georgian filmmaker Rati Oneli’s feature fiction debut Wild Dogs Don’t Bite follows his observational documentary debut on a derelict mining town City of the Sun, which premiered in the Berlinale Forum in 2017. He frequently collaborates with Dea Kulumbegashvili, including writing the screenplay for Beginning (IFFR 2021, HBF Development). Dealing in the winners and losers of post-Soviet Georgia, the film is a noir-inspired revenge thriller.

Nepalese filmmaker Sahara Sharma’s film My Share of the Sky is a search for the elusive dream of home in a patriarchal society, as a young woman grapples with uncertainty on the eve of her wedding. Sharma was the first female director to open the Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival with her Dogma 95-inspired debut Chasing Rainbows (2013). 

German co-producer Sara Fazilat was first introduced to the project by producer Abhimanyu Dixit during their participation on IFFR Pro’s Rotterdam Lab workshop in 2022. Dixit had previously won the Rotterdam Lab Award with the project when it was presented at India’s National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) Film Bazaar in 2021.

The selection moves into the realm of experimental, non-convention storytelling through the award for Estados generales by Spain-based Peruvian filmmaker, artist and researcher Mauricio Freyre’s whose work spans design, architecture and film. His installation Interspecies Architecture premiered at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021. The current project is a 16mm film that re-imagines the return voyage of a parcel of seeds from this deposit in the Botanical Garden of Madrid back to the place where they were picked in the southern coast of Peru.

Fresh from the premiere of their CineMart-presented Carissa in Orizzonti in Venice earlier this year, South African filmmaking duo Devon Delmar and Jason Jacobs are supported for Variations on a Theme. Like the former, the project is rooted in the rural experience, blending the magical world and the mundane on the margins between fiction and documentary. The project is a Dutch minority co-production with Interakt Productions.

Selection in full

Variations on a Theme, Devon Delmar, Jason Jacobs, South Africa, Netherlands

An elderly goat herder falls victim to a scam promising financial reparations for her father who was never paid for his service in WWII. As she waits for money that will never arrive, her family disrupts her routines on her 80th birthday and threatens to strip away the last of her independence.  

Lead producer: KRAAL (South Africa)
Applicant producer: Interakt Productions BV (Netherlands)

My Share of Sky (Ek Mutthi Badal – एक मुठ्ठी बादल), Sahara Sharma, Nepal, Germany

Caught between family expectations and her desire for freedom, a young woman faces the quiet, suffocating legacy of generational sacrifice in a society where women build homes but never truly belong.

Lead producer: Gauthali Entertainment (Nepal)
Applicant producer: Chromosom Film GMBH (Germany) 

Estados generales, Mauricio Freyre, Peru, Spain

Like a flare in the dark, the seeds from the storage room ‘S59’ in the Botanical Garden of Madrid’s herbarium – housing botanical material from former colonies that cannot be catalogued in the official historical archive – light up different worlds.

Lead producer: Estudio RIEN (Peru)
Applicant producer: Tasio (Spain)

Wild Dogs Don’t Bite, Rati Oneli, Georgia, Luxembourg

In a rapidly transforming Georgian society two vagabonds navigate a harsh world, seeking to reclaim their identities and forge a new path amidst violence and alienation.

Lead producer: Office of Film Architecture (Georgia)
Applicant producer: Les Films Fauves (Luxembourg)

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