Berlinale’s WCF to finance Iranian director’s work
The Berlinale’s World Cinema Fund (WCF) is to provide a total of €360,000 in funding for 14 international projects, including one Iranian project.
The WFC will give $30,000 for the production of Iranian film ‘Boomerang’, directed by Shahab Fotouhi, Screen Daily reported.
In its latest funding round, the WCF has recommended production funding for 11 projects and distribution grants for three films.
The 14 independent projects hail from Argentina, Chile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Mozambique, Nigeria, the Republic of Belarus, Rwanda, Senegal and Thailand.
The production funding recipients include ‘Demba’ by Senegalese writer-cum-director Mamadou Dia, whose feature debut ‘Nafi’s Father’ won the best first feature prize Locarno in 2019, as well as Thai director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s ‘A Useful Ghost’, which earlier this year received support from the Hubert Bals Fund. Boonbunchachoke participated in Berlinale Talents in 2021.
Also supported is Chilean director Diego Céspedes’ feature debut ‘The Mysterious Gaze Of The Flamingo’ which was presented at the Venice Film Festival’s Gap-Financing Market in 2022 and at the 2021 Sundance Producers Summit.
The WCF jury made its selection from 194 submitted projects from a total of 62 countries. The members of its jury are the documentary film producer and creative advisor Marta Andreu (Spain), the director, screenwriter and producer Ayşe Polat (Germany), film scholar and curator Viola Shafik (Germany / Egypt) and Vincenzo Bugno (Italy / Germany), the head of the WCF. Additionally, the jurors for WCF Africa are the producer, festival director of the Pan-African film festival FESPACO and the Berlin festival Afrikamera, Alex Moussa Sawadogo (Burkina Faso) and the filmmaker and curator Dorothee Wenner (Germany).
Last year, in the 35th jury session of the Berlinale World Cinema Fund (WCF), the juries made 11 funding recommendations for projects from Afghanistan, Argentina, Burkina Faso, Colombia, Georgia, Kenya, Lebanon, Mongolia, Paraguay, Peru and Vietnam. The funding amounts to a total of €493,000. The WCF is pleased to be able to support independent cinema even more strongly in times of crisis and to promote the visibility of the cultural complexity of our world.
WCF was formed in 2004. It has around €1m a year, with backing from the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the German ministry of foreign affairs, that stretches to support the production and distribution of films from areas of the world with limited filmmaking infrastructure.
Since 2014 WCF Europe has helped producers working in the European Union to co-produce with WCF-supported territories.