Hubert Bals Fund at IFFR 2025
As we gear up towards another edition of IFFR, we invite you to explore how the Hubert Bals Fund remains true to its mission of representing cinema in all its forms, discovering and supporting new talent, and reminding us of the power of human solidarity. Explore the activities of IFFR’s film fund across the IFFR 2025 and IFFR Pro programmes.

During IFFR 2025, you can find HBF across an exceptional lineup of projects, as well as in industry events and panels – from the five films featured in the festival’s various programming sections, to four CineMart and three Darkroom projects, and many alumni throughout the programmes.
IFFR Pro Dialogue: Representing Voices and Experiences of Displacement in Film
With one in every 67 people on earth forcibly displaced due to conflict, war, or persecution, supporting displaced filmmakers and authentic storytelling around the experiences of displaced people has never been more urgent. Cate Blanchett – actor, producer and global Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency) – together with Oscar nominated filmmakers Koji Yanai (producer, Perfect Days), Waad Al-Kateab (director, For Sama), Jonas Rasmussen (director, Flee) and Head of the HBF, Tamara Tatishvili will discuss how the film industry can better represent these voices and experiences. Moderated by producer Uzma Hasan.
Saturday 1 February, 15.30. Open to industry and press badge-holders, reservation information to follow.

Supported films in the IFFR 2025 selection
Five titles supported by the Hubert Bals Fund, for development, production and post-production, feature in the official IFFR 2025 selection. As well as This City Is a Battlefield, which has its world premiere as the IFFR 2025 closing film, all the titles have found immense recognition and applause at major international festivals, which made 2024 a milestone year for the Hubert Bals Fund.
In the Limelight section of the programme is Payal Kapadia’s fiction debut All We Imagine As Light. With a historical prize-winning festival run, including the 2024 Grand Prix at Cannes, the film is a poetic exploration of the intertwined lives of three nurses living in Mumbai, a gentrified metropole that bears witness to moments of friendship, tenderness, and loss. In an interview with IFFR Pro, the Indian filmmaker explains her bitter-sweet relationship with Mumbai, the use of documentary techniques, and the role of HBF’s support in bringing the film to life.
Artist-filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland takes on the Harbour section of the programme with her intimate documentary Monólogo colectivo, carefully painting a portrait of the charged, affective bond between the captive animals and those dedicated to caring for them with disarming attention and devotion. Her work can also be found in the Art Directions programme, with the installation Extramission: The Capture of Glowing Eyes presenting moving images and audio recordings alongside materials from early 20th-century issues of National Geographic magazines.

Wang Bing’s Youth Trilogy – Youth (Hard Times), Youth (Spring), Youth (Homecoming) – has its European premiere in Harbour. One of the most accomplished voices of contemporary documentary filmmaking, Wang Bing immerses audiences in the everyday lives of a group of young textile workers who migrate 150 kilometers from Shanghai to the manufacturing city of Zhili.
Georgian filmmaker Tato Kotetishvili uses his stylish fable Holy Electricity to transform the city of Tbilisi into a magical space that comes alive through fantastical and absurd vignettes. The Locarno-awarded and CineMart- and Darkroom-presented project will screen in the Harbour section.
IFFR’s closing film, This City Is a Battlefield, is set in 1946 and recreates life in Jakarta under Dutch colonial occupation in fastidious detail, unveiling it in all its seductive and brutal textures. Mouly Surya’s fifth feature is closely tied to the Bandung Conference Focus Programme, reinforcing the stories of the colonised and dispossessed while celebrating Indonesia’s cultural contributions to Rotterdam’s diverse heritage.
CineMart
Highlighting the historic interdependency between HBF-backed films and projects selected for CineMart and Darkroom, we present no less than seven projects – four CineMart and three Darkroom – that also received HBF support.
Kenyan filmmaker Angela Wanjiku Wamai’s (Shimoni, IFFR 2023) epic neo-Western Enkop (The Soil) sets the story of fifty-five-year-old Lorna Marwa’s fight to reclaim her life on the dusty expanses of Kenya’s volatile ranch land.
Indonesian filmmaker Kamila Andini brings Four Seasons in Java, exploring a woman’s journey in finding peace after being unjustly convicted of murdering a young man in self defence.
In the road film How Melissa Blew a Fuse, Melissa steals €200k from her workplace in Germany, buys a car, puts on music and heads towards her home town in Bosnia. This is the second feature from Bosnian filmmaker Una Gunjak.

From Kenya to Panama, Ana Elena Tejera’s Corte Culebra tells another anti-colonial story of displacement in the Panama Canal Zone, co-produced by Rotterdam Lab graduate Elisa Sepulveda Ruddoff, imagining a reconnection with the ancestral lands and communities after its return from American occupation.
Darkroom
Indian filmmaker Bikas Ranjan Mishra brings the anticipated CineMart 2013 presented Bayaan, a police procedural drama that explores the rise of religious nationalism in mainstream politics in India, starring Huma Qureshi as a rookie female detective.
For the first time, Darkroom features a dedicated focus, which for 2025 will be on Georgian filmmakers, providing them a platform of support and visibility.
Set amid violent demonstrations in Tbilisi, Uta Beria’s Tear Gas is a love story where Elene and Andro find each other among thousands of protesters. The project features the filmmaker’s personal images of demonstrations in Georgia in 2019.

Another Georgian project included in this dedicated focus is Rati Oneli’s Wild Dogs Don’t Bite, a noir-inspired revenge thriller that was supported by the HBF+Europe: Post-production Support scheme in October.
HBF alumni across IFFR programmes
In addition to the many HBF-backed projects across the IFFR programme, CineMart, and Darkroom, no less than eight HBF alumni will be present at the festival across various programmes.
Ukrainian filmmaker Dmytro Sukholytkyy, whose debut Pamfir was supported by HBF in 2023, returns to IFFR with Something Strange Happened to Me, which is presented at CineMart.
Also selected for CineMart is Ashim Ahluwalia’s Unidentified Actress, about an ex-child star turned sex-worker – a disturbing glimpse into the dark side of Indian cinema and the broken lives it left behind.
Jazmín López (HBF-backed Leones, IFFR 2013; Si yo fuera el invierno mismo, IFFR Tiger Competition 2020) investigates Argentina’s decent into military rule in the CineMart-presented project Faust, combining psychological thriller, espionage, and intimate drama inspired by Isabel Perón’s biography, president of Argentina before the dictatorship that seized power in 1976.
Brazilian filmmaker Marcelo Gomes (HBF-supported Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures, 2005; Portrait of a Certain Orient, Big Screen Competition IFFR 2024) returns to IFFR with Cape of Pleasures, set in a near-future where the elderly are forced into residences where they extract memories from the brains to provide new learning experiences to an AI system. The project will also be presented at CineMart.
In the Short & MId-length section of the programme, four filmmakers return to IFFR: Singaporean filmmaker Nelson Yeo with Durian, Durian, Brazilian filmmaker Pethrus Tiburcio with Tell Her What Happened to Me, Cabo Verdean filmmaker Nuno Boaventura Miranda with The Last Harvest, and Indian filmmaker Lipika Singh Darai with B and S.

Finally, Pelin Esmer returns to IFFR with And the Rest Will Follow, a tender drama in which two strangers spur one another’s imaginations to give shape to their life stories. Working across documentary and fiction, she distils our human relationships to ‘storytellers’ and ‘listeners’ who, inescapably, transform one another. Her debut feature 10 TO 11 (IFFR 2010) was supported by the HBF.
IFFR Pro Days 31 Jan – 5 Feb
The fund is active in the festival’s industry activities during the IFFR Pro Days, offering advice and informal guidance to filmmaking talent in the festival selection through networking roundtables, panels and workshops, as well as providing emerging producers in the Rotterdam Lab big picture perspective of industry transformation and challenges met by public funds internationally.

During the HBF Days on 2 and 3 February, the fund organises a number of panels and activities open to industry delegates. Staying true to its historical legacy, HBF fosters inclusive co-productions and addresses the current challenges of the funding landscape by unpacking its structural inequities and developing inclusive policies that empower producers and projects worldwide. Find an overview of the activities below.
Inclusive Film Funding: Practical Steps for Impact, 2 February
Based on insights shared in the EAVE Impact Think Tank Report on Inclusive Co-Productions, the invite-only day-long Inclusive Film Fund Workshop will unpack the topic of inclusive productions on 2 February.
Two HBF-focused panels will be presented as part of the Pro Hub’s Pro Dialogues programme of industry discussions open to all IFFR Pro delegates.
IFFR Pro Dialogue: Co-production Beyond Western Europe, 2 February, 11.00
Co-hosted by IFFR’s Pro Hub and panelists among which Payal Kapadia (All We Imagine as Light), Julien Ezanno (CNC), and Tamara Tatishvilii (Head of HBF), this panel engages participants in a conversation around how CNC – Aide au Cinéma du Monde and HBF funding tools can elevate your project and bring extra leverage in co-producing outside of Western Europe.
IFFR Pro Dialogue: Rethinking Co-productions – Strategies for a More Inclusive Industry, 3 February, 16.00
This panel aims to equip producers with the tools and strategies to thrive in the world of international co-productions. Attendees will gain real, practical insights with clear steps to create more compelling, impact films, and new connections to expand their networks and resources.
HBF Empowerment Award
For the first time and thanks to a private donor, the Hubert Bals Fund is granting a €10,000 cash award to one of the participants of the IFFR Pro Darkroom programme. This Award focuses on empowering filmmakers who come from politically challenging contexts or whose work addresses themes such as freedom of expression, displacement, human rights and/or underrepresented communities.
Upcoming deadlines and NFF+HBF guide
Look out for next deadlines following the festival and read through our support scheme deadlines.
The new NFF+HBF guide, which aims to link Dutch producers with HBF-backed projects, is now available.
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