05/08/2026 - The €200,000 allocation places a particular emphasis on filmmakers from Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia

International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund (HBF) has unveiled the 20 projects selected for its 2026 Development Support scheme, with each receiving a grant of €10,000. The cohort has grown by one-third compared with 2025, when 15 projects were backed through the fund’s flagship development initiative.

Eight of the selected projects emerged from a special regional focus encompassing Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. They include the first Macedonian project ever supported by the HBF, two projects from Ukraine, two from Serbia, and the feature debut by Georgian filmmaker and IFFR Tiger Short Award winner Anka Gujabidze.

The Macedonian project is As Long as You Can Climb a Tree, directed by Dina Duma. The tragicomedy centres on a 65-year-old former factory worker who, unable to afford the journey to her son’s wedding abroad, joins a group of elderly villagers staging fake dog attacks in order to claim state compensation. Gujabidze, meanwhile, is developing Bakhmaro – The Invisible Formula (Georgia), about a sick boy taken to the Georgian mountains in the hope that their supposedly healing mist will cure him.

Ukraine is represented by Philip Sotnychenko’s Carousel (Ukraine/Netherlands), which follows a journalist filming his private life with an old VHS camera during the Russian invasion, and Deus Ex Machina (Ukraine), Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi’s reconstruction of the occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. The Serbian projects are Mina Đukić’s time-bending love story Murmur (Serbia) and The Memory of Hair (Serbia/France/Croatia), a supernatural drama helmed by Dušan Zorić and Matija Gluščević, and involving production partners from France and Croatia.

Azerbaijani filmmaker Turkan Huseyn has received backing for Hear What You Remember (Azerbaijan/Turkey), in which a woman giving evidence in a murder trial must recover a suppressed memory while resisting efforts to influence her testimony. Elsewhere, Mongolian filmmaker Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir, whose debut, City of Wind, won the Orizzonti Award for Best Actor at Venice, returns to the fund with The Vision of Lonely Mountains (Mongolia/France). The project follows a Mongolian sumo wrestler confronting addiction, childhood abandonment and the violence embedded in his life.

Several established IFFR alumni appear in the selection. Alongside Gujabidze, Chinese director Dean Wei, winner of the 2026 Tiger Short Award and KNF Award, will make his feature debut with The Apple Doesn’t Fall… (China). Other returning filmmakers include Slaboshpytskyi, Sotnychenko, Đukić, Purev-Ochir, South Africa’s Nolitha Refilwe Mkulisi, the Dominican Republic’s Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias, and Tomás Pichardo Espaillat and Nika Zhukova.

Tamara Tatishvili, head of the Hubert Bals Fund, noted, “Development funding is increasingly under threat,” making the expansion from 15 to 20 grants particularly significant. She also highlighted the regional focus as a means of reaching areas frequently overlooked in international funding decisions, while describing the line-up as one marked by artistic freedom and a strong presence of IFFR alumni.

Displacement, migration and belonging recur across the slate. Pichardo Espaillat and Zhukova’s animated pic Donde duermen las abejas (Dominican Republic) revolves around the memories of an elderly woman and a displaced European refugee, whilst Marcel Beltrán’s A Room Outside the World (Brazil/Cuba) follows a Cuban artist rebuilding her life in São Paulo. Lincoln Péricles’ Filme de Arquivo (Brazil/Sudan/Kenya/France/Portugal) centres on an archive researcher capable of physically entering films while investigating erased family histories.

The selection also includes a significant African contingent. Babatunde Apalowo’s Nigerian-UK project In the Wake of Yesterday follows a records keeper exiled from a drought-stricken Sahel community after refusing to register her unborn child under a false name. Mkulisi’s South African absurdist satire Lady Pearl takes place in a luxury hotel whose glamour conceals an exploitative structure rooted in the country’s history. Later life is explored in Duma’s project as well as in Kanishka Sonthalia and Siddesh Shetty’s documentary Silver Linings (India), about older people in India searching for companionship through friendship clubs and speed-dating events.

The list of beneficiaries is rounded off by Avisan los animales by Virginia Urreiztieta (Mexico), Half Sea by Sheethal Namath Shyam (India), Home, Sick by Xiwen Cong (China/France/Netherlands/Portugal) and Te vienen a quitar tus congos by the aforementioned de los Santos Arias (Dominican Republic/Spain).

A 20th project and its director remain undisclosed.