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 Kamila Andini, once more cementing the current prowess of Indonesian cinema, Palestinian Muayad Alayan, whose “A House in Jerusalem” screened in Rotterdam in 2023, Midhun Murali, 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.
Conversation with the Sea, Muayad Alayan, Palestine
Four Seasons in Java, Kamila Andini, Indonesia
Goodbye for Now, Kasım Ördek, Turkey
Le goût de la pêche, Elene Mikaberidze, Georgia
MTV i.e. Mars to Venus, 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.