Displacement Film Fund: Who Gets to Tell Trauma Stories?

At the Cannes Film Festival, Cate Blanchett headlined the panel for the Displacement Film Fund, a joint initiative of UNHCR and the Hubert Bals Fund of IFFR. Launched in 2025, the fund awards €100,000 to filmmakers selected to narrate forced displacement experiences. The second cycle's five recipients—Mohammed Amer, Annemarie Jacir, Akuol de Mabior, Bao Nguyen, and Rithy Panh—span Palestine, Vietnam, Cambodia, South Sudan, and the American diaspora. However, a closer look reveals that most are already established within the global film industry: Amer is a Palestinian-American actor with a Netflix series; Jacir is a leading Palestinian auteur; Nguyen works in U.S. documentary; Panh is a canonized figure for his Cambodian genocide films. De Mabior, born in Cuba and raised between Kenya and the South Sudanese diaspora, is the daughter of John Garang de Mabior, the late liberation leader. The fund raises structural questions about how the international cultural system constructs authorship of displacement, potentially privileging those with pre-existing symbolic capital and institutional access. The initiative risks institutionalizing trauma representation rather than redistributing production opportunities, consolidating a transnational elite of trauma storytelling.