Cate Blanchett and the world premieres of the first five short films made by directors from Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia and Ukraine with grants of €100,000 ($120,000) each from the Displacement Film Fund, a scheme unveiled last year by the star and the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR)’s Hubert Bals Fund were in the spotlight in the Dutch port city on Friday.
Iranian auteur Mohammad Rasoulof (The Seed of the Sacred Fig), Maryna Er Gorbach, the Ukrainian director known for Klondike, Somali-Austrian filmmaker Mo Harawe (The Village Next to Paradise), Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat, who fled to Germany and will next month open the Berlin Film Festival, and Syria’s Hasan Kattan (Last Men in Aleppo) premiered their films and discussed them and the fund’s work during a press conference with Blanchett.
Also 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.
Calling the Displacement Film Fund “a passion project,” Australian star Blanchett lauded how different the five short films are. “The experience of being displaced is not monolithic,” she said. “There are commonalities and themes that emerge, but they’re 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.”
That is particularly important these days, Blanchett argued. “I think we’re quite unmoored from truth at the moment in the world,” she said. “And, of course, truth is made up from many different perspectives.”
The films can also help address “stigmas” and “misunderstandings” about what displacement means at a time of conflict, repression, violence and war, Blanchett said, pointing out “how displaced we are becoming from our own humanity.”
What’s next? “Now we need to find courageous distributors” for the shorts, she concluded, arguing that “audiences are hungry” for the kind of cinematic experiences created by the first filmmakers supported by the Displacement Film Fund, she said.
Blanchett’s comments came the day after Rotterdam 2026 kicked off with an impassioned plea by festival director Vanja Kaludjercic 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.
The press event for the fund’s first group of shorts took place at the Fenix Museum of Migration, an art museum dedicated to human migration.
Now, the creatives and the fund are looking for distribution opportunities for the five films. “It’s 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,” Blanchett told THR. “There’s been so much desire [to see these films]. There’s much more interest in this than we’re led to believe by that xenophobic, banal discourse that we’re forced to eat on a daily basis.”
