Hubert Bals Fund unveils projects selected for expanded 2026 Development Support scheme

IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund (HBF) has unveiled its selection of 20 projects to receive a grant of €10,000 each under its flagship Development Support Scheme 2026 – marking an increase of a third on the 2025 allocation of 15 projects. For 2026, eight of the 20 projects have been selected following a regional focus on Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia – including the first project the HBF has supported from North Macedonia, Tiger Short Award-winner Anka Gujabidze’s debut feature, and two projects each from Ukraine and Serbia.

Tamara Tatishvili, Head of the Hubert Bals Fund, said: “In times where development funding is increasingly under threat, it’s remarkable that we’ve been able to increase our grant allocation, from 15 in 2025 to 20 in 2026. This includes a welcome regional focus on Southeast Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia, ensuring our support reaches areas typically underrepresented in funding decisions. The selection carries a strong IFFR alumni presence and reflects an incredible breadth of contemporary filmmaking – distinctive voices expressing their artistic freedom, whatever the context. None of this would be possible without our partners, new and old, who help us to offer this early support to the world’s most promising filmmaking talent.”

A number of IFFR alumni are present within this year’s selection, including two IFFR Tiger Short Award-winners embarking on their feature debuts: Dean Wei (The Apple Doesn’t Fall…, IFFR 2026 and KNF Award) and Anka Gujabidze (Temo Re, IFFR 2025 and KNF Award). Recipients also include Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy (The Tribe, IFFR 2015 and HBF Development 2010); Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir (City of Wind, HBF Development 2021, Orizzonti (Horizons) Winner); Philip Sotnychenko (La Palisiada, IFFR 2023 and FIPRESCI Prize); Nolitha Refilwe Mkulisi (Let Them Be Seen, IFFR 2026 Bright Future); Mina Đukić (The Disobedient, IFFR 2014); Tomás Espaillat and Nika Zhukova (Olivia & the Clouds, IFFR 2025), and Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias (Pepe, HBF Development 2024, Berlinale Silver Bear Winner).

The HBF Development Support 2026 selection in full:

The Apple Doesn’t Fall…
Director: Dean Wei
China
Set within a dense residential compound where the lives of several families intersect, 17 year old dance student Xiaoliu returns home on leave after an unsettling encounter at school leaves her mute. As the Liu family struggles to maintain the illusion of unity, Xiaoliu’s body begins to undergo an inexplicable transformation.

As Long as You Can Climb a Tree
Director: Dina Duma
North Macedonia
A tragicomic portrait of aging and of people who continue searching for meaning while the world slowly erases them. After retiring from factory work, 65-year-old Bozana discovers her pension is too small to attend her son’s wedding abroad. Desperate for money, she joins a scheme in which elderly villagers fake dog attacks to claim state compensation. Through this journey, she confronts her loneliness, grief, and longing for connection, ultimately finding a hard-won sense of freedom.

Avisan los animales
Director: Virginia Urreiztieta
Mexico
After saving her mother from a suicide attempt, Anick (14), living in the southern Mexican jungle, turns to an evangelical healer for help. As a military railway project scars the land and a jaguar emerges as both threat and omen, she must choose between faith, survival, and the darkness she fears inheriting.

Bakhmaro – The Invisible Formula
Director: Anka Gujabidze
Georgia
The morning mist – the child’s footprints already fading.

The film takes place in the magical mountains of Bakhmaro where a young boy suffering from a lung disease needs its air to survive. A blend of history and compelling characters who bring to life a world that may soon cease to exist.

Carousel
Director: Philip Sotnychenko
Ukraine, Netherlands
During the war, a journalist who is supposed to document the invasion finds an old VHS camera at his parents’ home and begins filming his own life, but gradually loses connection with his loved ones and misses the birth of his son, who is later seen sitting alone on a carousel.

Deus Ex Machina
Director: Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
Ukraine
A reconstruction of the occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant by Russian forces – a true story of courage and betrayal.

Donde duermen las abejas
Directors: Tomás Espaillat & Nika Zhukova
Dominican Republic
Two people rescue each other from loneliness just when they need it most. Their bond becomes a home that endures over time.

Filme De Arquivo
Director: Lincoln Péricles
Brazil, Sudan, Kenya, France, Portugal
A film archive researcher with the rare ability to physically enter archival films is hired to investigate erased family histories, but each journey into the archive brings image and reality closer to collapse.

Half Sea
Director: Sheethal Namath Shyam
India
In their grandmother’s home in a small town on the Malabar coast, an audio-recorder draws Meen into a world of traces.

Hear What You Remember
Director: Turkan Huseyn
Azerbaijan, Turkey
To provide the key testimony in a murder trial, a woman must reconstruct a suppressed memory while resisting the manipulative forces determined to shape her version of the truth.

Home, Sick
Director: Xiwen Cong
China, France, Netherlands, Portugal
Zheng Tian, a Chinese student in France, returns to her hometown for the last winter break before graduation. Standing at a crossroads, she must decide whether to build a life abroad or come back to the place she once called home.

In the Wake of Yesterday
Director: Babatunde Apalowo
Nigeria, United Kingdom 
When a records keeper in a drought-governed Sahel village refuses to register her unborn child under a false name, she is exiled into the desert, where she discovers the archive that condemned her is only one fragment of a vast system stretching far beyond her world.

Lady Pearl
Director: Nolitha Refilwe Mkulisi
South Africa
A low-wage employee of an enigmatic luxury hotel nicknamed Lady Pearl is rewarded with a single night’s stay during the low season. As her family gradually arrives to claim the reward alongside her, they are mistaken for paying guests, and the promised night inexplicably distends into an endless stay, exposing the hotel’s glamour as an elegant mirage built on exploitation.

The Memory of Hair
Directors: Dušan Zorić & Matija Gluščević
Serbia, France, Croatia
Every night, Mihajlo wakes to the same nightmare: terrifying hair on the pillow beside him that vanishes the moment he turns on the light. As he descends into buried family memories and personal anxieties, a portal opens to a parallel reality where the mysterious hair will reclaim its body.

Murmur
Director: Mina Đukić
Serbia
As the ice melts between their open palms, time flows backwards, revealing two strangers bound by a silent recognition and a love that longs for neither shape nor certainty, but only the grace of existing.

Silver Linings
Directors: Kanishka Sonthalia & Siddesh Shetty
India
Older adults across India slip into friendship clubs and speed-dating events, searching for love while negotiating how openly it can be lived.

Te vienen a quitar tus congos
Director: Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias
Dominican Republic, Spain
Santo Domingo, the first laboratory of modernity. The wind carries women through forests, kitchens, archives, and forgotten rivers, tracing the lingering echoes of the Spanish Empire across the Caribbean, where race was invented, where the human became a question, where the dead continue to speak, and where the logic of empire never ceased to change its name.

A Room Outside the World
Director: Marcel Beltrán
Brazil, Cuba
Clara, a 65-year-old Cuban artist, recently immigrated to São Paulo. Far from her homeland, she works as a supermarket cashier to support herself. When her son decides to leave the country seeking a different path, she chooses to stay. Each night, she spends hours creating her artwork until this immense, foreign city becomes her own.

The Vision of Lonely Mountains
Director: Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir
Mongolia, France
A 35-year-old sumo wrestler of Mongolian origin is ordered by his doctor to stop his dependency on sleeping pills and listen to ocean sounds instead. Guided by the haunting song of whales, he goes on a spiritual journey, coping with the abandonment of his father when he was a child and grappling with the loneliness and violence that is ingrained in his life.

[Anonymous project]
Director: Undisclosed
Country: Undisclosed

Themes across the selection

This year’s HBF Development Scheme cohort features a number of projects that deal with themes of displacement, migration and belonging, including: Tomás Espaillat and Nika Zhukova’s animation Donde duermen las abejas, which traces an elderly woman’s memories of a displaced European refugee who found a home with her; A Room Outside the World, Marcel Beltrán (Rotterdam Lab 2015), which follows a Cuban woman rebuilding her life in São Paulo; while Lincoln Péricles’s Filme de Arquivo moves between Brazil, Portugal, France and Sudan to ask who gets remembered and who gets erased.

There is a strong African presence in the selection, including Babatunde Apalowo’s In the Wake of Yesterday which follows a woman exiled from a Sahelian settlement after refusing to falsify her own record, and Nolitha Refilwe Mkulisi’s (Let Them Be Seen, IFFR 2026) Lady Pearl – a thrilling absurdist satire set in a shape-shifting hotel, grappling with the long-term consequences of apartheid and the contradictions of modern South Africa.

A number of this year’s projects also feature examinations of ageing and later-life, such as Dina Duma’s As Long as You Can Climb a Tree, which follows a 65-year-old widow whose quiet life spirals into chaos after she joins a group of pensioners staging fake dog attacks to survive; Kanishka Sonthalia and Siddesh Shetty’s documentary Silver Linings captures older adults finding love through friendship clubs and speed-dating events.

HBF Development Support partners