Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof and Iranian-born Afghan director Shahrbanoo Sadat pushed back on the idea of a standalone Oscar category for exiled filmmakers, speaking at the Tokyo International Film Festival as Cate Blanchett’s Displacement Film Fund gave its first five short films their Japan premiere. The question followed the Academy’s recent rule change making exiled filmmakers eligible for the Oscars. The Academy’s top leadership was present at the festival this week.
This is funny, this is a joke to me,” said Sadat, whose fund-backed short is “Super Afghan Gym.” “I’m not sure if I would love to be in the category of displaced, even if they give me the Oscar.” Rasoulof, who directed the fund’s “The Sense of Water,” said that as a filmmaker he wanted to put all his energy into making films, and that from that point of view it might not matter much where they are shown. Clare Stewart, managing director of International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), whose Hubert Bals Fund manages the Displacement Film Fund, pointed out that Rasoulof’s own “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” nominated in the last Oscar cycle, was one of the first films to benefit from the change, and that it represented Germany. What dialogue does that create?
How does that open up our thinking more broadly about what the position of a displaced filmmaker or refugee filmmaker is in our social fabric?” Stewart said. So the fact that the Academy is recognizing that, I think is, it sounds like a small thing, but it is very profound,” she said. The first cohort’s films have already had an Academy qualifying screening in Los Angeles, Blanchett said, with another set for New York in mid-November.
It took shape at the UNHCR’s Global Refugee Forum in December 2023, where Blanchett, a UNHCR goodwill ambassador for more than a decade, first met Yanai Koji, a director and senior executive officer at Uniqlo parent Fast Retailing. Why aren’t we talking about them? And it’s a chance to dispel the toxic narrative that is often around displaced persons’ experience,” Blanchett said.
Stewart said the effort gathered pace in October 2024, when she told Blanchett about the Hubert Bals Fund, which IFFR has run for 30 years to support filmmakers in countries where infrastructure is thin or where getting a film backed is politically difficult. IFFR signed on to manage the new fund, which launched at the festival in January 2025. Its founding partners are Yanai’s production company Mastermind, Uniqlo, the Tama Family Foundation, the Amahoro Coalition and Dutch foundation Droom en Daad.
The Spinoza Foundation came aboard as a main partner at IFFR this year. The first cohort, unveiled at Cannes in 2025, comprises Rasoulof, Sadat, Mo Harawe, Hassan Fazili and Maryna Er Gorbach. Their films premiered at IFFR in January and have also screened in London and El Gouna, with São Paulo on the festival run as well.
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