Two new projects awarded by NFF+HBF
25 April 2022
Two defiant stories of love and resistance will receive production funds from the NFF+HBF Co-production Scheme. IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund collaborates with the Netherlands Film Fund to further support HBF development fund recipients that have an attached Dutch co-producer. In the first of two funding rounds for 2022, projects from two talented early-career filmmakers were each chosen to receive €75,000 of production support. Indian director Payal Kapadia's first fiction feature film, All We Imagine as Light, will be supported alongside Vietnamese director Truong Minh Quý’s Viêt and Nam.
Quý’s project will be his third feature, with his second, The Tree House, screening at IFFR 2020. Viêt and Nam focuses on a love story between two miners, one of which wants to emigrate to Europe, building on the director’s oeuvre which often interrogates the meaning of home. In an interview earlier this year, the director claimed the project would be “my personal response to the ambiguous history of the country.” An Original Picture is the Dutch co-producer behind the project that was presented at CineMart 2021 and received HBF development funds the year before.
“Love between miners inevitably expresses an underground resistance”, said Quý, a point that resonates in Kapadia’s proposal of a love story between two nurses in Mumbai who seek “to find a place to be free from the rules that govern them.” The project, All We Imagine as Light, follows Kapadia’s first feature documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing which won the Oeil d’Or for best documentary at the Cannes Quinzaine des Réalisateurs in 2021. The film weaved together traces of an intimate love story with contemporary Indian politics and followed her experimental short And What is the Summer Saying? which won a Special Jury Prize at IDFA in 2018. Amsterdam’s BALDR Film co-produces the project, which received HBF development funds in 2019 and was presented at CineMart in 2020.
NFF+HBF recipients spring 2022
- All We Imagine as Light, Payal Kapadia, France/India/Norway/Netherlands, co-produced by BALDR Film
- Viêt and Nam, Truong Minh Quý, Vietnam/Philippines/Netherlands, co-produced by An Original Picture
"It turned out to be more fun than we thought"
Truong Minh Quý updates IFFR Pro on his project Viêt and Nam.
