Kenyan filmmaker Angela Wanjiku Wamai has been selected to receive a Hubert Bals Fund Development Support grant of €10,000. Her upcoming feature film, Enkop (The Soil), was selected from a pool of 1,169 submissions, alongside 11 other projects from Belarus, Palestine, Indonesia, Brazil, and other countries. Wamai is the sole African filmmaker on the list.
The Hubert Bals Fund is delivered under the auspices of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), which Wamai has a history with, having screened her debut feature film, Shimoni, at the festival in 2023. Enkop (The Soil), the project for which she has received the new grant, is the story of 55-year-old Lorna Marwa’s quest to reclaim her life on Kenya’s volatile ranch land.
Wamai’s filmography includes the 2018 film, I Had to Bury Cũcũ, which premiered at Clermont-Ferrand. Her directorial debut, Dad, Are You Ok? released in 2020, debuted at the International Female Film Festival in Malmö.
Statement from Hubert Bals Fund
Tamara Tatishvili, Head of the Hubert Bals Fund, praised the selected filmmakers. “This wave of grant recipient filmmakers each come from a different context but share a common approach – they do not remain silent or give in to despair amid the challenges of our current times,” she said. “Instead, they stay active, speak up, and make their voices heard through their stories and artistry.”
“The filmmakers selected for the grants are just a fraction of those who submitted for consideration, making this an incredibly challenging round,” she added.
“We would like to thank our selection committees of international film industry members from across the world, whose expertise and invaluable perspectives helped us narrow down to these final twelve projects. We would also like to once again thank Susan Weeks, whose generous donation meant we were able to offer two extra grants in this round.”
Other Grantees
Other selected projects include Colhões de Ouro by Lillah Halla, Conversation with the Sea by Muayad Alayan, Exactly What it Seems by Darya Zhuk, Falso positivo by Theo Montoya, and Four Seasons in Java by Kamila Andini.
Previous Hubert Bals grant recipients include Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light and Marcelo Caetano’s Baby, both winners at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Other recipients include Tato Kotetishvili, whose Holy Electricity won the Golden Leopard in Locarno’s Concorso Cineasti del Presente program, and Mahdi Fleifel, whose To a Land Unknown received the Audience Award at this year’s Thessaloniki Film Festival.
The Hubert Bals Fund was founded in 1988 and it supports film projects in “every stage of the production process, working especially with filmmakers from countries where local film funding and infrastructure is lacking or restrictive”.
