The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR)’s Hubert Bals Fund (HBF) has unveiled the 20 projects to receive a little coin help to develop their next feature film projects and among the filmmakers we find Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias, Mongolia filmmaker Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir and Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy among the recipients. Formerly titled Radioactive when we reported on the project in June, after multiple different project attempts and a full scale war, Slaboshpytskiy is indeed on course toward his long-awaited sophomore feature film with Deus Ex Machina. Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias who saw his Berlinale preemed Pepe break out in 2024 (read ★★★★ review) is now working on Te Vienen a Quitar Tus Congos – an odyssey about modernity that traces a line between the Spanish Empire across the Caribbean. Purev-Ochir who gave us City of Wind (Lido Orizzonti selection in 2023) now returns to a familiar backdrop for The Vision of Lonely Mountains – this is about a 35-year-old sumo wrestler who might be in the need for a vacation. Here are the 2026 HBF development support grant recipients below (there are nineteen listings as there also happens to be one Anonymous project selected. We can expect these films to move into production as early as 2027, but mainly in 2028 for prestige fests in 2028/29:
Director: Dean Wei – China
A comedy set within a dense residential compound where the lives of several families intersect. At its heart is 17 year old dance student Xiaoliu, who returns home on leave after an unsettling encounter at school leaves her mute. As the Liu family struggles to maintain the illusion of unity, Xiaoliu’s body begins to undergo an inexplicable transformation.
AS LONG AS YOU CAN CLIMB A TREE
Director: Dina Duma – North Macedonia
A tragicomic portrait of aging and of people who continue searching for meaning while the world slowly erases them. After retiring from factory work, 65-year-old Bozana discovers her pension is too small to attend her son’s wedding abroad. Desperate for money, she joins a scheme in which elderly villagers fake dog attacks to claim state compensation. Through this journey, she confronts her loneliness, grief, and longing for connection, ultimately finding a hard-won sense of freedom.
AVISAN LOS ANIMALES
Director: Virginia Urreiztieta – Mexico
After saving her mother from a suicide attempt, Anick (14), living in the southern Mexican jungle, turns to an evangelical healer for help. As a military railway project scars the land and a jaguar emerges as both threat and omen, she must choose between faith, survival, and the darkness she fears inheriting.
BAKHMARO – INVISIBLE FORMULA
Director: Anka Gujabidze – Georgia
The morning mist—the child’s footprints already fading.
A boy with a lung disease can only be healed by the magical mist of Bakhmaro. As past and present echo through the mountains, human encroachment and indifference threaten to erase their unique spirit, and his story becomes a reflection of an age-old, unequal struggle.
CAROUSEL
Director: Philip Sotnychenko – Ukraine, Netherlands
During the war, a journalist who is supposed to document the invasion finds an old VHS camera at his parents’ home and begins filming his own life, but gradually loses connection with his loved ones and misses the birth of his son, who is later seen sitting alone on a carousel.
HALF SEA
Director: Sheethal Namath Shyam – India
In their grandmother’s home in a small town on the Malabar coast, an audio-recorder draws Meen into a world of traces.
DEUS EX MACHINA
Director: Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy – Ukraine
A reconstruction of the occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant by Russian forces – a true story of courage and betrayal.
FILME DE ARQUIVO
Director: Lincoln Péricles – Brazil, Sudan, Kenya, France, Portugal
A film archive researcher with the rare ability to physically enter archival films is hired to investigate erased family histories, but each journey into the archive brings image and reality closer to collapse.
HEAR WHAT YOU REMEMBER
Director: Turkan Huseyn – Azerbaijan, Turkey
To provide the key testimony in a murder trial, a woman must reconstruct a suppressed memory while resisting the manipulative forces determined to shape her version of the truth.
HOME, SICK
Director: Xiwen Cong – China, France, Netherlands, Portugal
Zheng Tian, a Chinese student in France, returns to her hometown for the last winter break before graduation. Standing at a crossroads, she must decide whether to build a life abroad or come back to the place she once called home.
IN THE WAKE OF YESTERDAY
Director: Babatunde Apalowo – Nigeria, United Kingdom
When a records keeper in a drought-governed Sahel village refuses to register her unborn child under a false name, she is exiled into the desert, where she discovers the archive that condemned her is only one fragment of a vast system stretching far beyond her world.
LADY PEARL
Director: Nolitha Refilwe Mkulisi – South Africa
A low-wage employee of an enigmatic luxury hotel nicknamed Lady Pearl is rewarded with a single night’s stay during the low season. As her family gradually arrives to claim the reward alongside her, they are mistaken for paying guests, and the promised night inexplicably distends into an endless stay, exposing the hotel’s glamour as an elegant mirage built on exploitation.
THE MEMORY OF HAIR
Director: Dušan Zorić, Matija Gluščević – Serbia, France, Croatia
Every night, Mihajlo wakes to the same nightmare: terrifying hair on the pillow beside him that vanishes the moment he turns on the light. As he descends into buried family memories and personal anxieties, a portal opens to a parallel reality where the mysterious hair will reclaim its body.
MURMUR
Director: Mina Đukić – Serbia
As the ice melts between their open palms, time flows backwards, revealing two strangers bound by a silent recognition and a love that longs for neither shape nor certainty, but only the grace of existing.
SILVER LININGS
Director: Kanishka Sonthalia, Siddesh Shetty – India
Older adults across India slip into friendship clubs and speed-dating events, searching for love while negotiating how openly it can be lived.
TE VIENEN A QUITAR TUS CONGOS
Director: Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias – Dominican Republic, Spain
Santo Domingo, the first laboratory of modernity. The wind carries women through forests, kitchens, archives, and forgotten rivers, tracing the lingering echoes of the Spanish Empire across the Caribbean, where race was invented, where the human became a question, where the dead continue to speak, and where the logic of empire never ceased to change its name.
UM LUGAR FORA DO MUNDO
Director: Marcel Beltrán – Brazil, Cuba
Clara, a 65-year-old Cuban artist, recently immigrated to São Paulo. Far from her homeland, she works as a supermarket cashier to support herself. When her son decides to leave the country seeking a different path, she chooses to stay. Each night, she spends hours creating her artwork until this immense, foreign city becomes her own.
THE VISION OF LONELY MOUNTAINS
Director: Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir – Mongolia, France
A 35-year-old sumo wrestler of Mongolian origin is ordered by his doctor to stop his dependency on sleeping pills and listen to ocean sounds instead. Guided by the haunting song of whales, he goes on a spiritual journey, coping with the abandonment of his father when he was a child and grappling with the loneliness and violence that is ingrained in his life.
DONDE DUERMEN LAS ABEJAS
Director: Tomás Espaillat, Nika Zhukova – Dominican Republic
Two people rescue each other from loneliness just when they need it most. Their bond becomes a home that endures over time.