Founded in 1988, the Hubert Bals Fund (HBF), based at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in the Netherlands, is the longest running of a number of international film funds.1 Between 1998 and 2010 the fund has supported close to nine hundred cinema projects through a number of programmes such as script development, low-budget digital production, postproduction and the distribution of finished films. The fund's remit is to provide assistance to films from developing countries and it has awarded money and resources to a number of critically acclaimed Latin American works such as Glue (Alexis Dos Santos, Argentina/UK, 2006), Japón/Japan (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/Germany/Netherlands/Spain, 2002), Mundo grúa/Crane World (Pablo Trapero, Argentina, 1999) and El custodio/The Custodian (Rodrigo Moreno, Argentina/France/Germany/Uruguay, 2006). It states that ‘although the Fund looks closely at the financial aspects of a...