Sørfond-supported films at this year’s festival

Watch the newly finished projects that have been granted support from The Norwegian South Film Fund – Sørfond.

We are proud to present the very latest films to receive funding from The Norwegian South Film Fund – Sørfond. The fund is run by The Oslo Festival Agency in partnership with the Norwegian Film Institute and aims to support film projects from developing countries where film funding is hard to come by for political or economic reasons. The fund’s assets come from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. You’ll find five Sørfond- supported films in this year’s program, fiction and documentaries from widely different part on the globe.

Sunless Shadows by Mehrdad Oskouei finally gets it’s Norwegian premiere at Films from the South, after opening the renowned documentary film festival IDFA in 2019. In his latest documentary about criminal youth in Iran, director Oskouei directs his focus on girls convicted of murder towards a male family member. We get an intimate glance into how the girls’ family relations affected their fatal choices.

In Karnawal, we meet Cabra, a rebellious teenager living with his mother in Quebrada near the border between Bolivia and Argentina. He dreams of becoming a professional malambo dancer, and is busy training for the annual carnival during which he’ll be performing from the main stage and competing in the local malambo championship. In the middle of this, Cabra’s distant and reckless father suddenly makes an appearance.

In Peruvian Contactado, the worn-out prophet Aldo meets Gabriel, a young man who almost adores the aging prophet. This strange meeting leads to an even stranger friendship, where the two try to revive the prophecies that once changed people's lives. Inspired by Albert Camus's novel "The Stranger," director Marité Ugás has made a film about faith and doubt, hope and desperation.

Map of Latin American Dreams 2

"Map of Latin American Dreams" by Martín Weber

If you love Latin American film, we can warmly recommend the documentary Map of Latin American Dreams. Director and photographer Martín Weber traveled around Latin America between 1992 and 2013, taking pictures of people while asking them to write down their dreams on a small blackboard. Years later, he has brought back the camera to see if their dreams have been fulfilled.

If you want to visit the African continent, however, the documentary How to Steal a Country is a terrifying insight into what is happening to a country marked by bottomless corruption. It shows how wrong it can go when South Africa's president's seemingly top priority is to hand out the state's assets to private actors, subject to eternal allegiance.

Sørfond-supported films: