Apart from projects in the Middle East and Mena region, for the first time, filmmakers
from Chile, Peru and Spain will receive funding from the programme. By Anand Holla

In Iraqi filmmaker Mohanad Hayal’s Death Street, Tariq, the sniper of Haifa Street in Baghdad, kills Ahmed on his wedding day. While Tariq prevents anyone from approaching the corpse in the street, an intimate and telling drama unfolds.
Saudi Arabia’s Haifaa al-Mansour’s animation film titled Miss Camel follows the story of a teenaged Saudi camel that challenges the deep-rooted restrictions of her culture by travelling across the kingdom to compete in the Miss Camel beauty pageant in Doha.
Algerian filmmaker Mohamed El Amine Hattou’s Searching for Janitou takes a wistful journey to unravel love in past and contemporary Algeria by exploring the unique phenomenon of a Bollywood film that swept the country in the 1980s.
These are just three of the interesting premises among the 30 promising projects from 19 countries – comprising 16 feature-length narrative films, 10 feature documentaries and four short films – which will receive funding for development, production or post-production.
On Monday, the Doha Film Institute (DFI) announced recipients of the Fall 2015 session of its grants programme following the Dubai International Film Festival, where 15 of the Institute’s previous grantees, four of which are world premieres, were showcased. The Fall 2015 session marks the eleventh session of the grants programme, which is dedicated to supporting new cinematic talent, with a focus on first- and second-time filmmakers.
Twenty-four of the projects are from the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region, while six are from the rest of the world. For the first time, filmmakers from Chile, Peru and Spain will receive funding from the programme.
The DFI said, “Stories of displacement, physical or spiritual journeys, tales of family life, the power of nature and the importance of protecting the environment are highlighted in the selections this Fall.”
Four projects from Qatar-based filmmakers were awarded grants – Hafiz Ali Abdullah’s The Search for the Star Pearl, about a young pearl diver from Doha who discovers a map to the most valuable gem on Earth, and sets sail with three teenaged friends in search of it; Hamida al-Kawari’s To the Ends of the Earth – the first Qatari feature documentary to receive a grant from the Institute – which follows a Qatari woman on an environmental expedition to Antarctica in search of hope; A J al-Thani’s Kashta, a family drama about a father who takes his sons out into the desert to teach them about hunting and survival; and Hend  Fakhroo’s The Waiting Room, about an Arab and a Western family who find themselves sharing a hospital room.
Among the 30 projects selected for funding, five are from Morocco – Fyzal Boulifa’s Pagan Magic, the story of a poor youngster working as a maid for a middle-class family; second-time grantee Uda Benyamina’s Bastard, about a 15-year-old girl who lives with her mother in a rough Parisian suburb; Yakout Elhababi’s Behind the Doors, which looks at family life and childhood set high in the Rif mountains of Morocco; Hind Bensari’s Weight Throwers, a documentary look at the struggles of two young athletes as they train for the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro; and Behind The Wall, by Karima Zoubir, a short film set in a Casablanca slum.
To enhance the mix, there are three animation projects – noted filmmaker Haifaa al-Mansour’s Miss Camel; Hafiz Ali Abdullah’s The Search for the Star Pearl; and Mortada Gzar’s Language, about a blind man on the streets of Baghdad who wakes up as a giant and reads the devastation of the city by touch.
Argentina once again emerges with a couple of fascinating projects. Milagros Mumenthaler’s Swiss/Argentinian film The Idea of a Lake is about a photographer who undergoes a personal exploration of her past and the absence of her father while creating a book of her work, while Maximiliano Schonfeld’s The Black Frost is a drama set on a plantation where a pernicious black frost threatens to devastate the countryside until a mysterious woman arrives.
Extending the environmental theme, Heidi Brandenburg and Mathew Orzel’s When Two Worlds Collide is the story of an indigenous Peruvian man and his people, and of the fate of one of our planet’s most valuable natural resources – the Amazon rainforest.
Fatma al-Remaihi, CEO of the DFI, said: “Our Fall grantees cover a broad range of subjects and represent some powerful new voices in cinema, especially from Qatar and North Africa with several projects supported from Morocco and Algeria. Animated films are very popular in our region so it is very encouraging to see an acclaimed filmmaker like Haifaa al-Mansour turn her skills to this important genre.”
Al-Remaihi further added, “We have supported more than 255 films since the inception of the grants programme and we continue to seek out projects with a strong directorial vision that are challenging, creative and thought-provoking.”
Submissions for the next funding round open January 6 and close January 19, 2016. Funding is available to projects by filmmakers from around the world, with an emphasis on support for filmmakers from the Mena region. Certain categories of funding are reserved for Mena and Qatari filmmakers. The fund is primarily for first- and second-time filmmakers.