{"id":10639,"date":"2026-05-12T01:52:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T01:52:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/10639\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T01:52:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T01:52:08","slug":"cate-blanchett-at-rotterdam-displacement-film-fund-shorts-premieres","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/10639\/","title":{"rendered":"Cate Blanchett at Rotterdam Displacement Film Fund Shorts Premieres"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tCate Blanchett<\/a>\u00a0and the world premieres of the first five short films made by directors from Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia and Ukraine with grants of \u20ac100,000 ($120,000) each from the\u00a0Displacement Film Fund<\/a>, a scheme unveiled last year by the star\u00a0and the International Film Festival Rotterdam<\/a>\u00a0(IFFR<\/a>)\u2019s Hubert Bals Fund were in the spotlight in the Dutch port city on Friday.<\/p>\n

\n\tIranian auteur Mohammad Rasoulof<\/a>\u00a0(The Seed of the Sacred Fig), Maryna Er Gorbach, the\u00a0Ukrainian director<\/a>\u00a0known for\u00a0Klondike, Somali-Austrian filmmaker Mo Harawe (The Village Next to Paradise<\/a>), Afghan filmmaker\u00a0Shahrbanoo Sadat<\/a>, who fled to Germany and will next month open<\/a> the Berlin Film Festival, and Syria\u2019s Hasan Kattan (Last Men in Aleppo) premiered their films and discussed them and the fund\u2019s work during a press conference with Blanchett. <\/p>\n

\n\tAlso unveiled during a press event was a second round of the grant scheme, whose strategic partner is the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR. Amahoro Coalition, Master Mind, the Tamer Family Foundation, and UNIQLO return as founding partners, with the SP Lohia Foundation joining as a new major partner.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tCalling the Displacement Film Fund \u201ca passion project,\u201d Australian star Blanchett lauded how different the five short films are. \u201cThe experience of being displaced is not monolithic,\u201d she said. \u201cThere are commonalities and themes that emerge, but they\u2019re wildly different, and each film is so distinct and comes from the inner being of all of these filmmakers. But when you see them together as a suite of films, as a cohort, I was so alive to the different points of view.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tThat is particularly important these days, Blanchett argued. \u201cI think we\u2019re quite unmoored from truth at the moment in the world,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd, of course, truth is made up from many different perspectives.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe films can also help address \u201cstigmas\u201d and \u201cmisunderstandings\u201d about what displacement means at a time of conflict, repression, violence and war, Blanchett said, pointing out \u201chow displaced we are becoming from our own humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s next? \u201cNow we need to find courageous distributors\u201d for the shorts, she concluded, arguing that \u201caudiences are hungry\u201d for the kind of cinematic experiences created by the first filmmakers supported by the Displacement Film Fund, she said.<\/p>\n

\n\tBlanchett\u2019s comments came the day after Rotterdam 2026 kicked off with an impassioned plea<\/a> by festival director<\/a> Vanja Kaludjercic<\/a> to protect the freedom of the arts at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump has been reshaping the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, including by renaming it the Trump-Kennedy Center. She also put a spotlight on cinema as a unifying, community-enabling force at a time of repression, violence, wars and upheaval around the globe.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe press event for the fund\u2019s first group of shorts took place at the Fenix Museum of Migration, an art museum dedicated to human migration. <\/p>\n

\n\tNow, the creatives and the fund are looking for distribution opportunities for the five films. \u201cIt\u2019s a work in progress, but we want to capitalize on that momentum [built from the fund having moved quickly on its first round of grants] and find distributors and platforms that are as courageous as the people who got involved so far,\u201d Blanchett told THR. \u201cThere\u2019s been so much desire [to see these films]. There\u2019s much more interest in this than we\u2019re led to believe by that xenophobic, banal discourse that we\u2019re forced to eat on a daily basis.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cate Blanchett\u00a0and the world premieres of the first five short films made by directors from Iran, Syria, Afghanistan,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10640,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[8916,4126,4127,883,4128,41],"class_list":{"0":"post-10639","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rotterdam","8":"tag-cate-blanchett","9":"tag-iffr","10":"tag-iffr-2026","11":"tag-international","12":"tag-international-film-festival-rotterdam","13":"tag-rotterdam"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10639\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}