During a panel event at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday, Cate Blanchett announced the second round of recipients for the Displacement Film Fund, the short film grant program she co-founded through her role as Global Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. The five filmmakers selected are Palestinian-American comedian and director Mohammed "Mo" Amer, Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir, South Sudanese filmmaker Akuol de Mabior, Vietnamese-American filmmaker Bao Nguyen, and acclaimed Cambodian director Rithy Panh.
Each filmmaker will receive a production grant of €100,000, which equals approximately $116,000. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the completed short films will have their world premieres at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, scheduled to run from January 28 through February 7, 2027. The fund was established in 2025 in partnership with Rotterdam's Hubert Bals Fund and is backed by a coalition of film industry professionals, business leaders, and philanthropists.
Amer, best known for his Netflix series Mo and his appearances on Ramy, is developing a short called Return to Sender. The project follows a Palestinian standup comedian navigating immigration rules while embarking on a world tour. Jacir, whose feature Palestine 36 received an Oscar shortlist nomination during the 2025-2026 awards season, is working on Deconstruction, a film inspired by the port city of Haifa that follows a man navigating questions of memory, absence, and reinvention.
De Mabior, who was born in Cuba and raised in Kenya, previously explored her own family's displacement in the 2022 documentary No Simple Way Home. Her new short, Traces of a Broken Line, focuses on a mother attempting to preserve what she can no longer pass down to the next generation, set against the backdrop of war and its effects on lineage. Nguyen, whose prior credits include Be Water and The Return, is directing How to Ride a Bike, the story of a Vietnamese refugee father who never learned to ride a bike and begins learning in secret after failing to teach his young son, confronting a shame he has carried since boyhood.
Panh, whose body of work includes The Missing Picture and S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, is producing a short titled Time… Speak. The film follows an exiled filmmaker returning to fragments of memory through shattered figurines, archives, and silence, reconstructing through cinema a form of life in which the disappeared continue to speak.
Blanchett, speaking at the event, addressed the response to the fund's first cohort. "The short form is a fantastic medium for these narratives, and the way audiences are connecting with the first five films is extraordinary. I'm heartened by the success of our first cohort and thrilled to be revealing the next group of artists to be supported," she said.
Clare Stewart, managing director of IFFR, and Tamara Tatishvili, head of the Hubert Bals Fund, also released a joint statement: "It is a privilege to return to Cannes with the Displacement Film Fund, following the remarkable journey we've embarked on with the first cohort and the success of their premiere screenings at IFFR 2026. The recipients of our second cycle once again reflect an extraordinary breadth of filmmaking talent – with each navigating their own personal experiences of displacement, and we are proud to help bring their vital stories into the spotlight. At a time of ongoing global uncertainty, our commitment to maintaining this fund only deepens, alongside our belief in championing film as a powerful force for encouraging empathy and positive change."
The first cycle of the DFF supported five filmmakers including Mohammad Rasoulof and Maryna Er Gorbach, whose resulting films premiered at IFFR 2026. The second cycle's completed films will also screen at the Tokyo International Film Festival in October, and a theatrical screening has been confirmed at New York's Film Forum in the fall, which will qualify all five films for Academy Award consideration.
