The Hubert Bals Fund of International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) has selected fourteen film projects to receive grants for postproduction and for script and project development. In its Fall 2013 selection round, the Fund gives 161,700 Euro to projects from nine Asian, Eastern European, Latin-American and African countries. The selection was made out of 464 applications, the highest number of funding applications to date. Five HBF supported projects get the opportunity to further develop their project as part of the Boost! programme.

Two of the eleven projects selected in the script and project development category are from Thailand. Cemetery of Kings by Golden Palm winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul and By the Time it Gets Dark by Anocha Suwichakornpong, who won a Tiger Award for her feature debut Mundane History in 2010. Emir Baigazin (Kazakhstan) also receives funding in this category for his second feature The Wounded Angel.

HBF also supported several projects by new and promising filmmakers with a contribution for script and project development, including two debut films from Serbia: Against the Day by Katarina Stankovic and Before Enmity by Dane Komljen. South African filmmaker Vincent Moloi also receives a grant in this category for Tjovitjo. His short film Berea is included in the African Metropolis short film programme, which has its European premiere at the upcoming IFFR.

Argentinean director Rodrigo Moreno receives a postproduction grant for his fourth feature Reimon, after receiving HBF funding for script and project development for this film in 2008. Reimon joins the harvest of recently finished Hubert Bals Fund-supported films that will screen during the upcoming International Film Festival Rotterdam (22 January – 2 February 2014).

See the full line up of the IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund Fall 2013 Selection Round online.

Yearly five projects selected for Hubert Bals Fund script and project development support get the opportunity to further develop their project with script consultancy sessions at Binger Filmlab as part of the Binger On Demand programme, a tailor-made approach to meet specific needs of a filmmaker's project. During IFFR, the Boost! projects are presented at either the CineMart or Rotterdam Lab.

The Boost! Selection of 2013 at the 31st edition of the CineMart/Rotterdam Lab consists of: Wild Fire by Ranjan Bikas Mishra (India), White Sun by Deepak Rauniyar (Nepal), La tierra y la sombraby by Cesar Acevedo (Colombia), Wasswa by Donald Mugisha (Uganda), and Tjovitjo by Vincent Moloi (South Africa).

The Boost! programme is a joint initiative of IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund, CineMart and Rotterdam Lab and Binger Filmlab in Amsterdam, in partnership with South Africa’s Durban FilmMart, Fundación TyPA from Argentina and the National Film Development Corporation of India. Boost! is supported by MEDIA Mundus of the European Commission.

The next application deadline for Hubert Bals Fund support is 1 March 2014. All information about the Fund can be found here.