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Cate Blanchett will host the New York premiere of the Displacement Film Fund. The films explore war, exile, identity, and the experiences of displaced communities around the world.
Photo Courtesy of the Displacement Film Fund. |
Five international filmmakers explore war, exile, identity, and belonging in a collection of short films screening November 11, 2026, with Blanchett and two directors in attendance.
Academy Award-winning actor and producer Cate Blanchett will host the New York premiere of five short films supported by the Displacement Film Fund on November 11 at Film Forum in Manhattan. The collection brings together internationally acclaimed filmmakers from Ukraine, Somalia, Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan, each examining the human consequences of forced displacement through stories that range from the psychological toll of war to the loss of language, identity, and home.
Presented in partnership with the Hubert Bals Fund of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), the program features work by Maryna Er Gorbach, Mo Harawe, Hasan Kattan, Mohammad Rasoulof, and Shahrbanoo Sadat. Gorbach and Harawe will join Blanchett in person for both screenings, scheduled for 6 and 7 p.m.
The collection premiered at the 2026 International Film Festival Rotterdam before receiving invitations to film festivals in London, São Paulo, and Tokyo. Its arrival in New York comes amid a global displacement crisis in which approximately one in every 70 people has been forced from home by conflict, war, or persecution.
Co-founded and led by Blanchett, the Displacement Film Fund (DFF) supports filmmakers who have experienced displacement or established a record of creating authentic stories about displaced communities. Its purpose is to bring those experiences into mainstream cinema while recognizing that displacement encompasses widely different lives, cultures, and circumstances.
The initiative was conceived at the 2023 Global Refugee Forum, hosted by UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, and launched at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2025. Blanchett developed the fund with film industry professionals and creative figures with personal connections to, or a strong commitment to addressing, forced displacement.
“I am privileged to share the inaugural life-affirming films supported by the Displacement Film Fund with Film Forum audiences in New York,” Blanchett said. “In bewildering times like these, where forces seek to separate us from our very humanity, visionary filmmakers matter more than ever.”
The Hubert Bals Fund serves as the initiative’s management partner. Founding partners include the Amahoro Coalition, MASTERMIND, Tamer Family Foundation, UNIQLO, and Droom en Daad. The SP Lohia Foundation joined as main partner in 2026, while UNHCR serves as a strategic partner.
Clare Stewart, managing director of IFFR, and Tamara Tatishvili, head of the Hubert Bals Fund, said supporting filmmakers working in difficult and often fragile circumstances has long been central to the fund’s mission. They described the five films as an extension of that commitment, with the filmmakers receiving support from the development of their ideas through completion.
The program opens a window to experiences rarely captured by headlines, where the consequences of displacement unfold through military service, restrictions on daily life, bureaucratic uncertainty, strained relationships, and the struggle to recover a creative voice.
In “Rotation” (12 minutes), Ukrainian director Maryna Er Gorbach follows a young woman who has moved from civilian life into military service. Through a therapeutic hypnosis ritual, she attempts to adjust to a reality transformed by war. Gorbach previously won the World Cinema Dramatic Directing Award at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival for “Klondike.”
Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat turns her attention to women’s daily lives in “Super Afghan Gym” (14 minutes). Set in a gym in downtown Kabul, the film follows housewives who gather during the gym’s only hour of the day reserved for women. Exercising behind closed doors, they discuss body norms, social expectations, and everyday concerns in a space temporarily set aside for them. Sadat’s most recent feature, “No Good Men,” was the opening-night selection of the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival.
The uncertainty of asylum takes a more personal form in “Allies in Exile” (40 minutes), directed by Syrian filmmaker Hasan Kattan. For 14 years, Kattan and fellow filmmaker Fadi Al-Halabi have traveled together through war and storytelling. Now confined to a hotel for asylum seekers in Britain, they confront a different kind of hardship: waiting, bureaucracy, and the hostility directed toward refugees. Against that backdrop, the two filmmakers turn their cameras on themselves, examining a friendship shaped by conflict and an uncertain future. Their shared commitment to filmmaking becomes a means of maintaining purpose when so much remains beyond their control.
Kattan served as cinematographer on the Academy Award-winning documentary short “The White Helmets” and assistant director on the Oscar-nominated “Last Men in Aleppo.”
Somali-Austrian filmmaker Mo Harawe explores a different kind of personal crisis in “Whispers of a Burning Scent” (27 minutes). A quiet wedding musician must navigate a decisive court hearing and an important wedding performance on the same day, while accusations that he has exploited his marriage to expose his private life to public scrutiny. Moving between the courtroom, city streets, and the stage, the musician confronts questions of loyalty, dignity, and unspoken guilt before making a restrained but irreversible decision.
Harawe’s feature debut, “The Village Next to Paradise,” became the first Somali film included in the official selection at the Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered in 2024.
Language becomes its own form of exile in “Sense of Water” (39 minutes), directed by Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof. Living in a foreign country, an Iranian writer struggles to reclaim his ability to write in a language that does not yet contain the emotional familiarity of his own. To express love, anger, joy, and sorrow, he must rediscover not only words but the meanings and memories attached to them.
Rasoulof directed “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” which received the Special Jury Prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, and “There Is No Evil,” winner of the Golden Bear at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival. Both films had their U.S. theatrical premieres at Film Forum.
The five films have attracted considerable critical attention since their Rotterdam premiere. Writing in the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw awarded the collection five stars, praising its range of moods and approaches, from humor and confession to disturbing and mysterious territory. He described the anthology as “five brilliant miniature artworks.”
The collection's subjects also reflect the breadth of the Displacement Film Fund’s ambitions. Rather than confining exile to the moment someone leaves home, the filmmakers examine what follows: the adjustment to military life, the search for privacy and autonomy, the frustrations of asylum, the public scrutiny of intimate relationships, and the challenge of expressing oneself in a new language.
The result is a program built around distinct artistic perspectives, with filmmakers whose careers have already attracted recognition at Sundance, Cannes, Berlin, and the Academy Awards. Their work places individual experience at the center of a crisis too often expressed principally through statistics.
The Displacement Film Fund’s inaugural collection will screen Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026, at 6 and 7 p.m. at Film Forum (209 W. Houston Street, New York City).
Cate Blanchett will host the screenings, with directors Maryna Er Gorbach and Mo Harawe appearing in person at both programs.
For additional information, visit Film Forum.
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