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Half of the films selected for Hubert Bals Fund are Asian

Hubert Bals Fund 2024
Six Asian films among the 12 recipients of the Hubert Bals Fund

After 1169 submitted projects and an incredibly challenging selection process, twelve feature films were selected to receive Hubert Bals Fund Development Support grants of €10,000 each. Among them, the six were from Asia. The winners include , once more cementing the current prowess of Indonesian cinema, Palestinian , whose “A House in Jerusalem” screened in Rotterdam in 2023, , whose animation “Kiss Wagon” won a special mention from the Grand Jury and the FIPRESCI award this year in Rotterdam. Check all the list below, along with AMP Articles on the recipients.

, Muayad Alayan, Palestine

, Kamila Andini, Indonesia

, Kasım Ördek, Turkey

, , Georgia

, Midhun Murali, India

Notes of a Crocodile, Daphne Xu, Cambodia, China, Canada

Midhun Murali won a Tiger Special Jury Award at IFFR 2024 for the dazzling mixed-media fantasy Kiss Wagon. His next project, MTV i.e. Mars to Venus, is awarded, a similarly inventive feature that combines four different genres as part of a protagonist’s cinematic experiment.

Palestinian filmmaker Muayad Alayan has screened at IFFR on several occasions, with the HBF-backed The Reports on Sarah and Saleem (IFFR 2018), and most recently A House in Jerusalem (IFFR 2023), which was also presented at CineMart. Conversation with the Sea is a love story about family, following a Palestinian man from Jerusalem who is ordered by an Israeli court to pay a debt owed by his son who died as a teenager 20 years ago.

Indonesian filmmaker Kamila Andini is supported for Four Seasons in Java, on a woman’s journey in finding peace after being wrongly convicted of murdering a young man. She was previously supported by the HBF for The Seen and Unseen, which had its world premiere in the TIFF Wavelengths strand in 2018.

The short Notes of a Crocodile by Chinese filmmaker Daphne Xu had its world premiere in the same strand in 2024, and is now the basis for a feature of the same name. The HBF backs the docufiction hybrid project, which weaves myth, queer desire and development politics against the Chinese development of a canal project in Cambodia.

Georgian filmmaker Elene Mikaberidze’s documentary Blueberry Dreams had its world premiere at CPH:Dox earlier this year. She’s supported for her debut fiction feature, Le goût de la pêche, on a young woman who runs a guesthouse caught in escalating geopolitical tensions. Kasım Ördek’s feature debut follows Sevgi who, living with a gang on the margins of Istanbul, is drawn into a dangerous search after her mother’s mysterious disappearance. His previous short Together, Alone screened at the Sarajevo and Chicago film festivals.


About the author

Panos Kotzathanasis

Panagiotis (Panos) Kotzathanasis is a film critic and reviewer, specialized in Asian Cinema. He is the owner and administrator of Asian Movie Pulse, one of the biggest portals dealing with Asian cinema. He is a frequent writer in Hancinema, Taste of Cinema, and his texts can be found in a number of other publications including SIRP in Estonia, Film.sk in Slovakia, Asian Dialogue in the UK, Cinefil in Japan and Filmbuff in India.

Since 2019, he cooperates with Thessaloniki Cinematheque in Greece, curating various tributes to Asian cinema. He has participated, with video recordings and text, on a number of Asian movie releases, for Spectrum, Dekanalog and Error 4444. He has taken part as an expert on the Erasmus+ program, “Asian Cinema Education”, on the Asian Cinema Education International Journalism and Film Criticism Course.

Apart from a member of FIPRESCI and the Greek Cinema Critics Association, he is also a member of NETPAC, the Hellenic Film Academy and the Online Film Critics Association.

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