Emir Baigazin, the Kazakh director of Harmony Lessons, has been chosen one of the 11 winners of the Hubert Bals Fund (HBF), Tengrinews report.
Emir Baigazin, the Kazakh director of Harmony Lessons, has been chosen one of the 11 winners of the Hubert Bals Fund (HBF), Tengrinews report.
Baigazin was awarded €10 thousand for his new film Wounded Angel.
The HBF was an initiative by the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 1989. The fund, according to the IFFR, “provides grants to remarkable cinema projects in various stages of completion”. Since its inception, the fund has supported over one thousand film projects from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Middle East and Eastern Europe. In 2014 the biggest number of application was received. But only 11 applicants out of 464 received funding.
Last year, Baigazin’s Wounded Angel won a production and distribution funding of the international Berlinale Residency fellowship program as well as the award of the Franco-German TV network ARTE at the European Film Market 2014. Recently, the talented filmmaker won the CineLink Work in Progress session at the Sarajevo International Film Festival.
Wounded Angel is co-produced by KazakhFilm’s Beibitzhan Muslimov and Anna Vilgelm along with the French Capricci Films.
Wounded Angel is the second film in the trilogy exploring complexities of adolescence. “Essentially, I am not making a film about teens or school life, rather it is a medium of presenting much more universal ideas. Harmony Lessons takes place in a school, while in Wounded Angel everything happens during a break,” Baigazin commented.
By Gyuzel Kamalova