The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) has unveiled the projects that will receive this year’s grants from its Hubert Bals Fund (HBF), which supports films from less-developed regions. The fund picked 15 feature projects from more than 900 submissions, selecting work from filmmakers from across Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas.
This year’s selection includes the first HBF-backed project from Tanzania, the satire Last Cow from director Amil Shivij, whose feature debut Tug of War screened in Toronto in 2021 and was Tanzania’s official Oscar submission. It was picked for this year’s Locarno film festival and will screen in the Open Doors sidebar.
Other African projects this year include Mwadia, a magic-realist drama on Mozambique’s colonial past and present trauma; the feature debut of documentary filmmaker Inadelso Cossa (The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder); Tears, the debut feature from Rwandan director Moise Ganza; and Coumba, the new film from Senegalese director Mamadou Dia, whose HBF-backed debut, Nafi’s Father, won the Golden Leopard at the 2019 Locarno film festival and was Senegal’s official entry for the Oscars.
IFFR alumni talent can be found throughout this year’s selection, with new features from Syrian director Farida Baqi (The Rapture), Indonesia’s Timoteus Anggawan Kusno (Orphaned Atlas), Kazakhstan filmmaker Renata Dzhalo (Nobody to See Us), Malaysian director Amanda Nell Eu (Lotus Feet) and Brazil’s Stephanie Ricci (Boca da noite) among the 2025 HBF recipients.
The selected directors will receive a €10,000 ($11,760) grant each to help develop their projects into finished features.
In addition to its regular fund, the HBF launched two new development schemes this year. Together with two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett, the HBF in January announced the Displacement Film Fund, offering grants of €100,000 ($104,000) each to five filmmakers, displaced by war or conflict, to make original shorts.
A jury, made up of Blanchett, Wicked star Cynthia Erivo, documentarians Jonas Poher Rasmussen (Flee) and Waad Al-Kateab (For Sama), director Agnieszka Holland (Green Border), Rotterdam festival director Vanja Kaludjercic, activist and refugee Aisha Khurram and Amin Nawabi [alias], the LGBTQ+ asylum seeker who was Rasmussen’s inspiration for his Oscar-nominated documentary Flee, announced the first fund grantees in Cannes this year.
Also in Cannes, the HBF announced a cooperation with the three leading Brazilian film promotion bodies — Spcine, RioFilme, Projeto Paradiso — launching HBF+Brazil: Co-development Support, a three-year initiative to provide early development funding for up to nine fiction films, with €10,000 ($11,760) grants each. The submission deadline for HBF+Brazil projects, on IFFR.com, is Sept. 15.
Full list of 2025 Herbert Bals Fund development support projects
Amateur, Carlos Díaz Lechuga, Cuba, Spain The Appalling Human Voice of the Animals, Neritan Zinxhiria, Greece, Albania Boca da noite, Stephanie Ricci, Brazil Coumba, Mamadou Dia, Senegal Girl With a Camera, Xiaoxuan Jiang, Hong Kong, China The Immigrants, Suman Mukhopadhyay, India Last Cow, Amil Shivji, Tanzania, Canada Lotus Feet, Amanda Nell Eu, Malaysia Moto, Chris Chong Chan Fui, Malaysia Mwadia, Inadelso Cossa, Mozambique Nobody to See Us, Renata Dzhalo, Kazakhstan, France, Moldova Orphaned Atlas, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, Indonesia The Rapture, Farida Baqi, Syria, Lebanon, Germany, Netherlands Tears, Moise Ganza, Rwanda Where Shadows Wait, Arya Rothe, India, Italy
ABC News Studios has picked up the U.S. rights to Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, director Ally Pankiw’s feature documentary about Sarah McLachlan’s 1990s all-female music festival.
On the heels of a world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Canada’s CBC network, which commissioned the project, will air the indie doc on Sept. 17 as part of its The Passionate Eye series. Then, in the U.S., Hulu and Disney+ will stream the title from Sept. 21, with Disney+ also streaming the documentary internationally, excluding Canada.
The film will coincide with McLachlan launching her first studio album of new music in over a decade, Better Broken, on Sept. 19 and a Canadian concert tour.
“I’m so filled with pride and nostalgia watching this film,” McLachlan said about the Lilith Fair doc in a statement. “Ally and the team have beautifully captured the magic and strength of a community of women who came together and lifted each other up to create positive change in the world. I hope the film resonates with everyone and we can continue to strive to support and champion one another.”
Dan Levy’s Not a Real Production Company and indie Canadian distributor Elevation Pictures are co-producing the documentary with interviews by McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, Brandi Carlile, Erykah Badu, Bonnie Raitt, Jewel and Olivia Rodrigo, among others. The film is presented by White Horse Pictures, in association With Epic Magazine.
“This film has been a labor of love for Sarah, Dan and Ally as well as the many talented teams who have been a part of it. Diane Sawyer and everyone at ABC News Studios are excited to be a part of the journey.” Debra OConnell, president, ABC News Group and Disney Entertainment Networks, said in a statement. “Much like Lilith Fair itself, this project is the result of a wonderful collaboration among artists, producers and storytellers who have come together to chronicle one of the most defining moments in music over the past 30 years.”
The first Lilith Fair, which McLachlan spearheaded to defy a male-dominated music industry that couldn’t envision more than one woman performing on a concert stage or on a radio playlist, kicked off on July 5, 1997. Over a quarter-century later, the film, authorized by McLachlan and inspired by the 2019 Vanity Fair article Building a Mystery: An Oral History of Lilith Fair, by writers Jessica Hopper, Sasha Geffen and Jenn Pelly, and Epic Magazine, will have a glitzy world premiere at Roy Thomson Hall during TIFF.
“Lilith Fair holds a very special place in my heart,” Dan Levy added in a statement. “It was one of the first spaces where I remember feeling at home. The music, the sense of community, and the power of a group of women proving an entire industry wrong was a tremendous thing to experience. What Sarah built with that festival changed so much for so many people. And while it is now seen as an odds-defying success story, it was an uphill battle every step of the way. And there is a lot to be learned from that story. it’s an honor to be working alongside Sarah on this and I am excited for everyone to understand just how revolutionary Lilith Fair really was.”
Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery draws on over 600 hours of never-before-seen archival footage, interviews and stories from fans, festival organizers and artists of Lilith Fair, an antidote to mainstream tours like Lollapalooza dominated by flashy male artists. Despite being a commercial success over an initial three summers, the documentary recounts how the Lilith Fair tour saw its first female headliners often marginalized and the event itself become a cultural punchline on Saturday Night Live.
The lesson of Lilith Fair — that women artists could have their own stage on which to perform and feel safe — will be front and centre as the Canadian documentary launches in Toronto. Pankiw has credits that include I Used to Be Funny and Black Mirror, and ties to Hulu after directing episodes of its Shrill and The Great series. Pankiw also helmed the full first season of the Netflix comedy Feel Good, starring Mae Martin.
Sales agent White Horse Pictures is shopping the film internationally, while Elevation Pictures also set to release the Lilith Fair doc theatrically in Canada.
The film is produced by Levy and Christina Piovesan, with White Horse Pictures’ Cassidy Hartmann, Nicholas Ferrall, Nigel Sinclair, along with Jeanne Elfant Festa, Noah Segal, Jessica Hopper, Arthur Spector, Joshuah Bearman, Joshua Davis, Pankiw, Steve Cohen, Paula Froehle and Wayne Isaak sharing executive producer credits. Rachel McLean serves as supervising producer and the cinematographer is Nina Djacic.
The film is backed by McLachlan’s Lilith Fair co-founders Terry McBride, Dan Fraser and Marty Diamond, who will executive produce alongside Lynne Stopkewich, Jessica Fraser and Dean English.
The documentary is presented by Chicago Media Project and produced in association with Epic Magazine, Carlene Laughlin, Minderoo Pictures and the Elfant Festa Family.
Politically-charged dramas and documentaries from Ukraine to Iran, and from Mexico to Kenya will share the spotlight at the Venice film festival’s Venice Days sidebar, which announced its 2025 lineup today.
The diverse program ranges from the section’s opening night film, the autobiographical drama Memory Ukrainian artist and filmmaker Vladlena Sandu, a survivor of the war in Chechnya, who studies her traumatic memories in order to transcend and transform them via the art of cinema; to Spanish director Gabriel Azorín’s Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes about two young men returning from the front who spend a day of confession and revelation in an ancient Roman thermal bath; to Memory of Princess Mumbi, from Kenyan filmmaker Damien Hauser that combines elements of sci-fi, mockumentary and animation to tell a dystopian fable set in an imaginary Africa in the year 2093 after an A.I.-precipitated disaster.
‘Memory of Princess Mumbi’
Courtesy of Venice Days
The 10-film competition lineup put together by Venice Days artistic director Gaia Furrer includes 2 Iranian films about exile. The documentary Past Future Continuous from Firouzeh Khosrovani and Morteza Ahmadvand, which follows an Iranian woman who fled following the Islamic Revolution and now can only observe her parents via the security cameras installed in their home in Tehran, and Inside Amir, from director Amir Azizi, which explores his own fears and doubts when considering emigration.
Venice Days’ out-of-competition special events lineup includes several documentaries, including Who Is Still Alive, from Swiss filmmaker Nicolas Wadimoff, recounting the experiences of nine Palestinian refugees from Gaza; and With Writing Life, from French documentarian Claire Simon, which uses the words of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Annie Ernaux, through readings of her books by French high school students, to form a portrait of the younger generation. The sidebar also includes the 9-film out-of-competition section Venetian Nights, which highlights titles from major Italian producers.
Italian director Gianni Di Gregorio, whose sleeper hit Mid-August Lunch won Venice Critics’ Week’s Lion of the Future prize in 2008, returns to the Lido with the comedy Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t, in which he also stars as a retired professors whose placid and monotonous existence is shaken up by the arrival of his daughter and his rowdy grandchildren. The film will close Venice Days, running out of competition.
The president of this year’s Venice Days jury is Norwegian writer and director Dag Johan Haugerud, whose queer love story Dreams, the final film in his Sex, Love, Dreams trilogy, won the Golden Bear for best film at the Berlinale in February. Haugerud’s breakout film, Barn premiered at Venice Days in 2019. Joining him on the jury are Italian producer Francesca Andreoli (Vermiglio), Franco-Palestinian filmmaker Lina Soualem (Bye Bye Tiberias), Tunisian cinematographer Sofian El Fani (Timbuktu), and New York’s MoMA film curator Josh Siegel.
Check out the full Venice Days lineup below.
OFFICIAL COMPETITION
Memory, dir. Vladlena Sandu (France, Netherlands) (Opening film) Gioia, dir. Nicolangelo Gelormini (Italy) Bearcave, dir. Stergios Dinopoulos, Krysianna Papadakis (Greece, UK) Short Summer, dir. Nastia Korkia (Germany, France, Serbia) A Sad and Beautiful World, dir. Cyril Aris (Lebanon, USA, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Qatar) Past Future Continuous, dir. Firouzeh Khosrovani, Morteza Ahmadvand (Iran, Norway, Italy) Memory of Princess Mumbi, dir. Damien Hauser (Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland) Vainilla, dir. Mayra Hermosillo (Mexico) Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes, dir. Gabriel Azorín (Spain, Portugal) Inside Amir, dir. Amir Azizi (Iran) Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t, dir. Gianni Di Gregorio (Italy, France) (Closing film, out of competition)
SPECIAL EVENTS
Laguna, dir. Sharunas Bartas (Lithuania, France) Writing Life – Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students, dir. Claire Simon (France) I Want Her Dead, dir. Gianluca Matarrese (Italy) Who Is Still Alive, dir. Nicolas Wadimoff (Switzerland, France) Do You Love Me, dir. Lana Daher (France)
NOTTI VENEZIANE (Venetian Nights)
6:06, dir. Tekla Taidelli (Italy) Amata, dir. Elisa Amoruso (Italy) Confession – How I found out I wouldn’t make the revolution, dir. Bonifacio Angius (Italy, Poland) A near thing, dir. Loris Nese (Italy) Dom, dir. Massimiliano Battistella (Italy, Bosnia-Herzegovina) A State Film, dir. Roland Sejko (Italy) Full speed backward!, dir. Antonio Morabito (Italy) Life Beyond the Pine Curtain– America the Invisible, dir. Giovanni Troilo (Italy) Toni, my father, dir. Anna Negri (Italy)
Laysla De Oliveira is slated to co-star in upcoming rodeo flick Cowboy, the directorial debut feature film from Cameron Duddy, bass player for country band Midland, The Hollywood Reporter can reveal.
Oliveira (Lioness, Locke & Key, Guest of Honour) joins a cast that had already included Ben Foster, Rudy Pankow, Gabriel Basso, Midland lead singer Mark Wystrach and retired NFL veteran Taylor Lewan.
Cowboy follows the story of Foster’s Lee “Babe” Midnight, described as a “washed-up rodeo legend drifting between small-time shows and shady deals” who ends up becoming a mentor to Pankow’s young aspiring rodeo rider Clif Casey. Oliveira will play Alejandra Cruz, Lee’s ex-girlfriend and mother to an 11-month-old son.
Other than Oliveira, Cowboy also adds Simon Rex (Red Rocket), Carlos Pratts (Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, McFarland, USA) and Cameron Sault in supporting roles, the latter of whom is making his acting debut. Rex will play Lee’s former rodeo partner who’s now wheel chair-bound following a riding accident, while Pratts will play another successful rodeo rider. Sault will play Steve, “a rough and rowdy member of the road dogs group Vaqueros Galacticos” who Like Sault himself, is deaf. Sault was discovered through Deafinitely For All Entertainment, a Deaf founded production company focused on highlighting the deaf and hard of hearing community in the entertainment business.
Cowboy is the first picture coming out of Paint Horse Pictures, a new banner out of Range Media Partners‘ Nashville division. Duddy and Midland are management clients at Range’s Music division, which also represents artists including Shaboozey, Jack Harlow and Noah Cyrus. When first announcing Cowboy last month, Paint Horse said it is looking to “produce films deeply rooted in Americana and its pioneering spirit, bringing compelling narratives from the backroads to big screens.”
Prior to his feature-length debut, Duddy was also a respected music video director, directing the videos for hits like Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk,” Mars’ “24K Magic, Fifth Harmony’s “Worth It” and John Mayer’s “Last Train Home,” among others. Cowboy’s screenplay comes from Adair Cole, based on a story Duddy wrote with Midland guitarist Jess Carson.
“This is a personal story for me,” Duddy said in a statement when the film was announced in June. “It’s a film about what it takes to grind it out on the road chasing your dreams, and the emotional and physical toll it takes on all of us, most of all the people we love.”
Cowboy’s producers include Endgame Entertainment’s Lucas Smith, Range executives Matt Graham and William Lowery, and Ian Bryce of Ian Bryce Productions. Foster is also executive producing with David Keinath and Jordan Yospe for DFA entertainment. The other executive producers include Brightlight Productions’ Shawn Williamson, Endgame’s James D. Stern and Paint Horse’s Sydney Allen. Range Select is co-representing the film’s global film rights alongside UTA’s Independent Film Group.
Ellyn Jade and Star Slade are young indigenous women forced on the run after a violent encounter with a predatory cop in the trailer for Eva Thomas’ Nika & Madison, whose world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival was announced on Wednesday.
Their flight from the law becomes a feminist crime thriller and a feature adaptation of Thomas’ earlier short film Redlights. “Am I under arrest?” Madison, played by Slade, who appeared opposite Nicholas Cage in Dream Scenario, asks a police officer from the backseat of a cruiser after being caught up in a bar brawl.
“No, I am driving you home,” the cop assures his passenger. But he’s not, and an attempted sexual assault against Madison follows and echoes real-life starlight tours in Canada, where police officers have picked up indigenous people at night, mostly men, and cruelly abandoned them on a city’s outskirts, often in freezing winter conditions.
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Lucky for Madison, her childhood friend Nika beats the officer off with a blow to his head, which leaves him hospitalized in a coma, and the two young women the focus of an escalating police manhunt. Here, Thomas focuses less on police brutality and a rigid justice system in Nika & Madison than what’s in the hearts of two young women feeling misunderstood and needing to escape to the big city on a journey of friendship and discovery.
First they elude the pursuing police on their reservation, and then the wilderness. Eventually they leave for Toronto, where Madison has been going to university. “No matter what happens, you are my sister. I love you,” Nika tells Madison as the trailer’s tension rises. “I love you too,” her bestie and protector responds.
In a director’s statement, Thomas wrote: “My goal with Nika & Madisonis to create a journey that feels grounded and unflinching, one that centers Indigenous women not as victims or symbols, but as fully alive, complex people. I want audiences to feel not only the urgency of the issues at hand, but the depth of love and spirit that makes survival possible. I want them to root for Nika and Madison like they’d root for their own sisters.”
Kelly Boutsalis, the international programmer, Canadian features at TIFF told The Hollywood Reporter the indie drama looks to balance longstanding politics and greivances with personal and community discovery through the eyes of its two main characters: “The women in Nika & Madison cannot ignore the mistrust that they have in the police and judicial systems, based on years of mistreatment. That said, their relationship is definitely at the core of this film, coming back together after an unspoken rift, and working past their differences, in the aftermath of the event between Madison and the young cop. I loved how their community came together around them during this time.”
In Redlights, Jade appeared as Tina alongside Kaniehtiio Horn (who played the Deer Lady in Reservation Dogs) as best friend Amber. Thomas earlier co-directed the feature Aberdeen with Ryan Cooper. Nika & Madison marks the first feature Thomas directed on her own.
Nika & Madison also stars Amanda Brugel, Jennifer Podemski, Gail Maurice and Shawn Doyle. The feature, co-written by Michael McGowan, is also produced by Thomas and executive produced by Podemski, Paula Devonshire, Horn, Jade, Tyler Levine and Katelyn Cursio.
Nika & Madison will screen in the Discovery sidebar in Toronto and will get a local release by Game Theory Films. Canoe Film will be shopping the film to international buyers at TIFF.
Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis are back together, 22 years after starring in beloved comedy Freaky Friday.
Freakier Friday reunites the duo as mother and daughter Tess and Anna Coleman, who swapped bodies in the original film and, in the sequel, discover that lightning may indeed strike twice.
At Freakier Friday‘s L.A. premiere on Tuesday, Lohan told The Hollywood Reporter that the follow-up movie is “bigger, we have more stories to tell. It’s a four-way swap and there’s more music and there’s a lot more physical comedy than the first one, which I love. Any moment that I can pull a Lucile Ball, I’m down for it.”
Lohan and Curtis have remained close friends since they worked together two decades ago, as Lohan explained, “She was there for me at a time of my life when my mom was busy with my siblings, and she was kind of like another mother figure to me out here in L.A. That’s kept us pretty tight-knit over time, and we’ve always just been in contact.”
Curtis added that in working with the 15-year-old Lohan in the first film, “I said to her from day one, ‘I want nothing from you except your own peace and serenity. And I am safe, I’m a home base; I don’t want anything, I’m not going to ask you to come to anything.’” She continued, “I don’t want her to feel transactional with me, I want her to feel love.”
The film is a return to the big screen for Lohan, who has marked her Hollywood comeback with a series of Netflix films over the past few years. Looking forward, the star said she’s “doing a TV show with Hulu that I’m really excited about and I’d like to take on some more serious, dramatic roles. And I love doing romantic comedy because that’s where my home is and I feel like where my fans want to see me, but I’d like to take on some things that are different; maybe find something that’s an action-packed film. Just really show people a different side of me.”
Also returning for the sequel is love interest Chad Michael Murray, who joked of Curtis and Lohan, “I’ll ride those girls’ coattails anytime. I came in, and you never know what to expect, you’re sitting there going, ‘Oh God, let’s not screw it up.’ You’re going to make a sequel and I hate to say it but it’s as good, if not better — they delivered.”
Also at the premiere, the film’s fictional band Pink Slip surprised guests with a special performance prior to the screening, and Lohan was joined on the carpet by her Parent Trap co-stars Lisa Ann Walter and Elaine Hendrix.
