The International Film Festival Rotterdam has appointed Iwana Chronis to lead the festival’s Hubert Bals Fund. Chronis will take the position of Fund Manager from 1 June 2009. She takes over from Bianca Taal, who led the fund from 2007 until March 2009, when she left the IFFR to work for the Binger Filmlab in Amsterdam. Over the Hubert Bals Fund has been involved in a number of South African projects.
Iwana Chronis (1977) has extensive working experience in combining culture and international development. She studied Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Utrecht (The Netherlands) and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne (Australia). After internships at, among others, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam and the UNESCO Headquarters (Paris, France), she managed from 2005 to 2008 the Cultural Emergency Response (CER) programme of the Prince Claus Fund (The Netherlands). CER provides global first aid for cultural heritages that have been damaged or destroyed by man-made or natural disasters.
During those years, she collaborated with IFFR’s CineMart for the Prince Claus Fund Film Grant.
Currently Iwana Chronis works as Coordinator program partners of the Movies that Matter Festival (The Hague) and as Committee Secretary of the ‘Fonds voor Beeldende Kunst, Vormgeving en Bouwkunst’ (The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, Amsterdam).
The Hubert Bals Fund is designed to bring remarkable or urgent feature films and feature-length creative documentaries by innovative and talented filmmakers from developing countries closer to completion. The Hubert Bals Fund provides grants that often turn out to play a crucial role in enabling these filmmakers to realize their projects. Although the Fund looks closely at the financial aspects of a project, the decisive factors remain its content and artistic value.
For more information on The Hubert Bals Fund visit www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com.
