-3.png)
Across Borders: Meet the Filmmakers Selected for the Connecting Cultures Program
Now in its sixth year, the Connecting Cultures Program has announced the six films selected in its second 2026 round. From Sudan and Ukraine to Iran and Palestine, the selected filmmakers approach questions of war, exile, memory, love and survival through radically different cinematic forms. As selected filmmakers, each becomes a recipient of the Tarkovski Grant, an initiative that allows them to submit their work free of charge to a network of international partner film festivals.
For an independent filmmaker, making a film is only part of the journey. Getting that film seen is another challenge altogether.
Festival submission fees can accumulate quickly, particularly for filmmakers attempting to build an international festival trajectory. What might be a manageable expense for a filmmaker in one part of the world can become a significant obstacle in another. Economic instability, restrictions on international payments, conflict, censorship and displacement can make participation in the international festival circuit considerably more difficult.
The Connecting Cultures Program was created in 2021 in response to that imbalance.
The principle behind the program is straightforward. Filmmakers from a selected group of eligible countries can submit their work to Connecting Cultures free of charge. The program then reviews those submissions and selects a number of films and filmmakers for support.
Selection comes with something very practical: the Tarkovski Grant.
Every filmmaker selected by the Connecting Cultures Program becomes entitled to a Tarkovski Grant, which gives them the opportunity to submit their selected film, free of charge, to participating partner festivals within the program's international network. Instead of the filmmaker having to pay individual submission fees as the film continues its festival journey, the grant opens those submission opportunities without that financial barrier.
In that sense, Connecting Cultures is the selection program, while the Tarkovski Grant is the mechanism through which that selection turns into continued support.
The aim is not simply to waive a single submission fee. It is to create a bridge between filmmakers and festival programmers who might otherwise never encounter one another, and to give selected films a greater opportunity to travel internationally.
Behind the initiative is Belgian filmmaker and festival curator Kris De Meester, who founded Connecting Cultures in 2021 and continues to curate the program on a voluntary basis. Alongside his own work as a filmmaker, De Meester serves as curator for multiple international film festivals, an experience that has given him a close view of both sides of the festival ecosystem: the programmers looking for distinctive new work and the independent filmmakers trying to bring that work to them.
Connecting Cultures grew out of that experience. Rather than functioning as a commercial activity, the program is voluntary work, built around a simple idea: where financial or geopolitical circumstances make access to the international festival circuit disproportionately difficult, the festival community itself can help lower some of those barriers.
Now in its sixth year, the program has completed its second selection round of 2026. Six films have been selected: works from Sudan, Ukraine, Iran and Palestine, ranging from feature-length documentary to animation, experimental cinema and short fiction.
They are markedly different films. Yet viewed together, certain ideas repeatedly surface: distance from home, the consequences of war, interrupted relationships, memory, political violence and the ways people continue to search for connection after something has been irreversibly changed.
Nothing Happens After the Revolution — Ibrahim Omar
Sudanese filmmaker Ibrahim Omar confronts exile and the reverberations of revolution in the 80-minute documentary Nothing Happens After the Revolution.
The film begins with filmmaking itself. While Omar is making his graduation film in Cairo, revolution erupts in his home country of Sudan. The fictional film he is attempting to make follows a family unable to bury their deceased child. Gradually, that story begins to resonate with the filmmaker's own experience of watching events unfold in a homeland from which he is physically removed.
That relationship between cinema and reality lies at the heart of Nothing Happens After the Revolution. A film being made becomes entangled with history happening elsewhere. Fiction and lived experience begin to mirror one another, while the inability to bury a child becomes part of a wider meditation on helplessness, suspension and exile.
Omar describes the film as an exploration of “suspended time” and a “suspended homeland”: a work concerned with events and traumas that refuse to reach a conclusion.
It is territory that has occupied the filmmaker across several works. A graduate of the Higher Institute of Cinema in Cairo and founder of the Sudan Film Institute, Omar has explored exile, memory and post-trauma through a body of films connected by these recurring concerns. Nothing Happens After the Revolution forms part of that wider exploration.
The film had its world premiere in the Burning Lights Competition at Visions du Réel in Nyon in April 2026.
What makes the work particularly appropriate to the Connecting Cultures Program is the way displacement operates on several levels at once. There is geographical displacement—the filmmaker in Cairo while Sudan undergoes enormous upheaval—but there is also the peculiar psychological distance of witnessing events that concern one's home while being unable to physically intervene.
Cinema becomes a means of crossing that distance.
unavailable — Kyrylo Zemlyanyi
Distance takes another form in Ukrainian filmmaker Kyrylo Zemlyanyi's 20-minute short unavailable.
Serhii is a young volunteer whose mother remains in occupied territory. The two lose contact. Eventually, she decides to evacuate, but Serhii then learns that a humanitarian convoy from his hometown has been destroyed in a bombing raid.
Behind the immediate circumstances of war, Zemlyanyi identifies another story: the moment in which the relationship between a child and a parent changes.
The director describes the film as an exploration of the inevitable distance that develops between a person and the place from which they come. Serhii is caught somewhere between childhood and adulthood, suddenly confronted with responsibilities for which he is not prepared. The loss of contact with his mother transforms that transition into something far more profound.
“When the bond between mother and child is suddenly broken,” Zemlyanyi writes of the film, what remains is a fragile connection that cannot simply be reconstructed.
Born in Tokmak, Ukraine, Zemlyanyi is pursuing doctoral research in film directing, focusing on the synthesis of fiction and documentary cinema. That intersection feels particularly significant in a work in which a fictional narrative exists alongside a contemporary reality that has transformed the lives of millions of Ukrainians.
unavailable has already travelled extensively on the international festival circuit, with screenings listed at the Venice Film Festival, Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal, Vilnius International Short Film Festival, Trieste Film Festival, Kyiv International Short Film Festival and other festivals. At Kyiv's Molodist International Film Festival, the film received recognition from the Ukrainian Film Critics and a jury special mention.
Its inclusion in Connecting Cultures extends that journey further.
The Drunken Boat — Hamed Amiri
If Nothing Happens After the Revolution and unavailable find their language in the relationship between personal experience and political reality, Iranian-Kurdish filmmaker Hamed Amiri moves into an entirely different cinematic territory.
His experimental animation The Drunken Boat lasts just under six minutes and takes its inspiration from Arthur Rimbaud's poem Le Bateau ivre.
But rather than illustrating Rimbaud through conventional animation, Amiri constructs the work through machinima, using the virtual environment of the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as a filmmaking space.
The combination is an unlikely one: a nineteenth-century French poem and the visual architecture of a twenty-first-century video game. Yet it speaks directly to Amiri's interest in experimental cinema, modern poetry and unconventional forms of cinematic expression.
Born in Kermanshah, Iran, in 1996, Amiri began his filmmaking journey in 2017 at the Iranian Youth Cinema Society in Kermanshah. His work has subsequently developed around experimentation with cinematic language and the relationship between moving images and poetry.
The Drunken Boat demonstrates how little contemporary independent filmmaking needs to depend upon traditional production infrastructure. A commercially created digital world can be appropriated and transformed into raw cinematic material. Spaces originally designed to be navigated by a player become locations to be framed by a filmmaker.
For a support initiative concerned with access, there is something particularly interesting about this approach. Amiri's film is an example of cinema finding a way to exist through the materials that are available—reconfiguring an existing virtual world into a new artistic one.
Cyber Bee — Evgen Matvienko
Ukrainian filmmaker and creative director Evgen Matvienko also turns toward war, but concentrates his film on what happens to an individual after surviving it.
Cyber Bee, a short work of just under four minutes, follows a warrior who has endured devastating injuries. Survival initially brings little sense of victory. Confronted with despair and believing that the life he knew has ended, he struggles to find a reason to continue.
The film then moves toward recovery. Through the support of others, its protagonist begins to rediscover both himself and his faith in other people.
Matvienko is a Kyiv-based producer and creative director with more than twelve years of experience creating films and series for international clients and platforms. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, his focus has shifted toward work dealing with the experiences of those defending the country and the consequences of the conflict.
In Cyber Bee, those consequences are not treated solely as events occurring on a battlefield. The film turns instead toward what follows: injury, despair, dependence on others and the difficult process of constructing a life after catastrophic change.
At less than four minutes, it is also the shortest work in this Connecting Cultures selection. Its presence alongside an 80-minute documentary such as Nothing Happens After the Revolution illustrates the breadth of the program's conception of cinema. Scale and duration are secondary to the perspective a filmmaker is trying to communicate.
Someone loves someone, and loves them more, and loves them more… — Angelik Ustymenko
One of the most intimate works in this selection begins not with contemporary correspondence, but with letters written more than a century ago.
In the experimental animated short Someone loves someone, and loves them more, and loves them more…, filmmaker Angelik Ustymenko turns to the correspondence between two major Ukrainian literary figures: Lesia Ukrainka and Olha Kobylianska.
Their correspondence lasted fourteen years, from 1899 until 1913. The letters contain affection, tenderness and longing. Following one of their meetings, the writers began referring to one another using the coded, gender-neutral language of “someone” and “somebody.”
Even more strikingly, their letters incorporated drawn lines representing the movement of hands—small visual gestures attempting to overcome physical separation and create a form of closeness across distance.
Ustymenko takes this historical material and transforms it into a roughly ten-minute work of animation and experimental cinema.
Within the context of the wider 2026 selection, the film creates an unexpected resonance. Distance is everywhere in these six works, but here it is neither a humanitarian convoy nor national exile that provides its expression. It is correspondence. Two people separated in space attempt to preserve intimacy through language, codes and marks on paper.
The result also returns attention to something easily forgotten when discussing cultural exchange primarily in terms of nations and borders: culture is transmitted through intensely personal relationships as well. Letters survive their writers. Words cross decades and centuries. An intimate exchange between two people can eventually become part of a country's cultural memory—and, through cinema, acquire yet another life.
Strike the Walls — Sadegh Davari
The final selected work, Sadegh Davari's eight-minute experimental short Strike the Walls, announces itself in almost elemental terms.
Its synopsis invokes the angel of history rising to awaken the dead and rebuild what has been destroyed, before turning to a line associated with Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “We have on this earth what makes life worth living.”
Davari's accompanying statement is shorter still: “Even under the rubble, the dream does not die.”
Born in 1988, Davari holds a master's degree in dramatic literature and works as a writer, director and editor. His previous shorts include The Siloam and Beatrice is Dead, alongside work in theatre and film production.
With Strike the Walls, Davari enters the territory of experimental cinema, using an eight-minute form to engage with destruction, memory and persistence.
The imagery suggested by the film's own description—the dead, ruins, reconstruction and the refusal of a dream to disappear beneath rubble—places destruction and creation in direct proximity. The wall can represent enclosure or separation, but it is also something that can be struck, challenged or ultimately rebuilt.
That tension gives the film a particular place within this year's Connecting Cultures selection.
Six Films, Different Forms, Shared Distances
It would be reductive to suggest that these six filmmakers have been selected because they tell the same story. They clearly do not.
One filmmaker works with feature-length documentary; another with fiction. Others turn toward experimental animation, machinima or compressed audiovisual forms lasting only a few minutes.
What connects them is something broader.
Again and again, these films ask what remains when familiar forms of connection are interrupted.
A filmmaker watches revolution unfold in his homeland from Cairo. A Ukrainian son loses contact with his mother in occupied territory. Two writers separated by physical distance invent their own language for intimacy. A wounded soldier must reconstruct a relationship with life itself. A filmmaker transforms a video-game environment into a vessel for poetry. Another looks toward ruins and insists upon the persistence of a dream.
These are films about separation, but they are also films about the forms people invent to overcome it.
And perhaps that makes them particularly fitting recipients of the Tarkovski Grant.
What Comes Next
For these six filmmakers, selection by the Connecting Cultures Program is not intended to be the final destination. In many ways, it is the beginning of another stage.
Their selection entitles them to the Tarkovski Grant, through which they can submit their selected films free of charge to participating festivals in the program's international network. Each festival retains its own independent selection process—the grant does not guarantee festival selection—but it removes the submission fee that would otherwise accompany each attempt to bring the film before another programming team.
That distinction is important. Connecting Cultures does not determine where these films will ultimately screen. It gives their filmmakers more opportunities to place the work in front of those who do.
International film culture depends upon this circulation. Films need to travel. Programmers need opportunities to encounter work made outside their immediate networks, and filmmakers need ways of reaching audiences beyond the circumstances in which their films were created.
Since its foundation in 2021, Connecting Cultures has attempted to make that circulation a little more accessible for filmmakers facing financial, political and geographical barriers.
Six years later, that purpose remains remarkably visible in the films selected for the second round of 2026.
These six works originate in different places and employ very different cinematic languages. Some have already appeared at major international festivals; others are only beginning their journeys. What they share is the desire to communicate something across a distance.
That distance might exist between countries, between a mother and her son, between lovers, between a person and a lost version of their life, or between an artist and an audience they have never met.
The Connecting Cultures Program cannot erase those distances.
But it can help a film cross them.
Comments