Cate Blanchett attended the Louis Vuitton 2026 Cruise Show in Avignon, France on 22 May. On 23 May, Cate was part of the panel discussing the new Displacement Film Fund at the Cannes Film Festival.

Louis Vuitton Cruise Show

Louis Vuitton and Nicolas Ghesquière brought the fashion pack to Avignon and its world-famous Palais des Papes, whose imposing Gothic architecture heightened the “Excalibur” vibes of the collection, which spanned from busy medieval tunics and jaunty capes to soft Joan of Arc dresses in metallic jersey.

“Women’s armor for everyday life,” Ghesquière said, flashing a smile.
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“The first time I came to Avignon was for the [theater] festival,” Cate Blanchett, a regular on the stage, said as she arrived at the VIP cocktail in a dramatic batwing blouse.

Full article on WWD

Blanchett and her long-time stylist, Elizabeth Stewart, have long been advocates of upcycling pieces for even the most formal of occasions. The actor last wore this bold blouse during her 2023 awards run for Tár, not long after the piece debuted on the Louis Vuitton runway.

Cannes Film Festival

Displacement Film Fund

Five filmmakers from Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia and Ukraine are the recipients of the inaugural Displacement Film Fund, a short film grant scheme recently unveiled by Cate Blanchett and the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s (IFFR) Hubert Bals Fund, and the star was in Cannes on Friday to celebrate the recipients, who include Iranian auteur Mohammad Rasoulof (The Seed of the Sacred Fig), and raise awareness.

The recently unveiled fund is designed to “champion and fund the work of displaced filmmakers, or filmmakers with a proven track record in creating authentic storytelling on the experiences of displaced people.”

Blanchett was joined for the Cannes event by IFFR managing director Clare Stewart, grant recipients Maryna Er Gorbach, the Ukrainian director known for Klondike, and Somali-Austrian filmmaker Mo Harawe (The Village Next to Paradise), along with Rajendra Roy, chief curator of film at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“It’s a pilot program to allow a more mainstream audience access to the work of the five recipients of the grant,” Blanchett shared as she took time in between a busy Cannes schedule to talk to THR on Friday via Zoom. “Part of being here in Cannes is a call to arms to the rest of the industry to help to find mainstream platforms to get these voices out, because it’s potentially an incredibly exciting form of storytelling for a wider audience.”

Joining Blanchett in the Zoom conversation were Stewart, Syrian filmmaker Hasan Kattan (Last Men in Aleppo) and Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat, who fled to Germany and whose debut film Wolf and Sheep won the top award in the 2016 Directors’ Fortnight program at Cannes. The two filmmakers weren’t in attendance at Cannes.

“We’re doing short films with full production funding because of that urgency, that desire to get films out there, to make a profile for the need of the industry to galvanize around this,” explained Stewart, echoing the notion of the fund as “a call to action.”

She also highlighted that Roy’s presence is key given his role as “co-chair of the international award at the Oscars, and they have just made a change to the regulations there to support refugee and displaced filmmakers to be able to participate more fully in the awards process.”

The Displacement Film Fund pilot program is offering grants of €100,000 ($104,000) each to the five displaced filmmakers to make original shorts. Blanchett headed up the selection committee, joined by Wicked star Cynthia Erivo, documentarians Jonas Poher Rasmussen (Flee) and Waad Al-Kateab (For Sama), director Agnieszka Holland (Green Border), Rotterdam festival director Vanja Kaludjercic, activist and refugee Aisha Khurram, and Amin Nawabi [alias], the LGBTQ+ asylum seeker who was Rasmussen’s inspiration for the Oscar-nominated Flee.

“The numbers of people outside their their country of origin around the world has just ballooned and continues to grow,” Blanchett told THR. “I’m a global Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR, and when I started working with them 10 years ago, the numbers were around 60 million, and it’s now over 120 million. And while people are displaced, they don’t stop being mothers, brothers, uncles, cousins, nor do they stop being filmmakers and artists. And given that it’s one of the great challenges that we’re facing as a species, it’s always bewildered me why these incredible stories, heartbreaking sometimes, yes, but inspiring and having more points of connection to people’s lives who are not displaced, why they don’t get told more frequently. So that was part of the DNA of the idea.”

She lauded “a real coalition of the willing” for making the fund happen quickly.

The five short films will have their world premieres at IFFR next year but Blanchett and Stewart “and others who are coalescing around the fund are also very committed to indeed [figuring out] what the lives of the films will be” beyond that, the Stewart said. “That’s what we are here to sort out,” Blanchett concluded.

And the star highlighted that the stories told by displaced creatives will be able to surprise audiences. “There are so many surprising narratives that emerge, often heartbreaking, but also full of resilience and transformation,” Blanchett said. “Part of the DNA of the fund in its pilot stage is to sort of reject and challenge the stereotypes and the categorizations that swirl around the discourse about what it means to be displaced. These might be genre-driven or romantic or surprising stories that really speak to the breadth of that experience and entertain an audience. And then they happen to find out that the filmmaker is displaced or that there’s much more connective tissue between their experience and their own.”

Concluded Blanchett: “It’s a wonderful beginning, in that way, to really allow the audience to go through some sort of revelatory transformation as much as perhaps the filmmakers getting a chance to pick up the pieces of their amazing careers that they had to leave behind when they left their countries.”

Full article on THR

Authoritarian regimes “first come for great acts of culture” when they start to curtail civil liberties, Cate Blanchett warned as she launched a new grant for displaced film-makers.

The two-time Oscar winner and goodwill ambassador for the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), has teamed up with the international film festival Rotterdam’s (IFFR) Hubert Bals Fund to set up the Displacement Film Fund, which will support displaced film-makers or those with experience in refugee storytelling.

Its pilot version is bestowing a grant of €100,000 (£84,000) to five film-makers – Maryna Er Gorbach (Ukraine), Mo Harawe (Somalia, Austria), Hasan Kattan (Syria), Mohammad Rasoulof (Iran) and Shahrbanoo Sadat (Afghanistan) – whose short films will premiere at IFFR 2026.

“History has shown us that when authoritarian regimes start to curtail civil liberties, they first come for great acts of culture,” Blanchett told the Guardian on Friday.

“The metaphorical noses are always removed from statues. I think there’s a cautionary tale to the way artists are silenced; it’s often the thin end of a very thick wedge. And it’s undeniable that this is happening globally now. Oppression comes in many forms, and it’s touching all our lives to greater and lesser degrees.”

A recent report by Freemuse said artistic freedom was more threatened globally than ever, citing a culture of “censorship (including self-censorship), imprisonment, travel bans, misuse of defamation, harassment, blasphemy legislation, misuse of anti-terrorism legislation” and violence.

Blanchett said the idea for a new fund was born after “a group of us collected at the global refugee forum 18 months ago, and pledged to one another that we would find a way to highlight displaced perspectives and help them find a more mainstream audience”.

It comes amid a global crisis, with 122.6 million people forcibly displaced owing to war, persecution or human rights abuses, according to the UN. This amounts to one in 67 people worldwide, with 71% of displacements occurring in low- and middle-income nations.

“Forced displacement around the world is one of the greatest challenges that we face as a species, yet it’s often outside the mainstream cultural conversation. When I started working with UNHCR 10 years ago, the numbers of forcibly displaced people around the world were approaching 60 million. They’re now over 120 and rising,” Blanchett said.

“I think it’s very easy to be overwhelmed by those numbers and to disconnect from the individuals behind the numbers. Refugees are often stigmatised, demonised and ostracised. They are often used as political footballs. But during my travels with UNHCR, I’ve heard stories of resilience, and great humour, and have even found portals into my own experience. I found that I have much more in common with these people than the mainstream media would make me believe.”

The Australian actor, who has appeared in dozens of critically acclaimed films, including Tár, Carol and Blue Jasmine – and who created the 2020 Australian series Stateless about unlawful detention in Australia – said it was important to find common themes in other people’s stories and experiences.

Film-making, she said, was a way to “break down” the barriers between us. “We’re told that refugees are coming for our jobs or going to disrupt civil society. But in fact, these people have so much to offer. They’re architects, lawyers, doctors, plumbers, they’re people who are highly skilled, whose lives have been put on hold, but their humanity has not,” Blanchett said.

“These issues get politicised overly quickly, so there was an urgency to reclaim a positive, constructive discourse around them.”

Full article on The Guardian

Uniqlo is stepping in to support films made by refugees from around the world. The Japanese brand is donating 100,000 euros to support the newly launched Displacement Film Fund. The initial round will support five filmmakers from across the globe, with their films set to debut at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2026.

Each filmmaker will receive up to 100,000 euros from the fund to produce a film under one hour that explores the experience of being displaced.

“The growing human displacement is one of the great challenges facing us as a species, but yet somehow, like climate change, it’s off the mainstream conversation, and I always find that quite bewildering,” said Cate Blanchett during a press conference and panel discussion opened by Cannes Film Festival artistic director Thierry Frémaux.

Blanchett, who has served as an ambassador for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees since 2016, said the program aims to support filmmakers who can reach audiences “perhaps outside of their comfort zone and break down the stigmatization of those stories.”

Displaced people are defined as those forced to flee their homes due to conflict, persecution, violence, or human rights violations.
The idea for the project originated 18 months ago, and the team acted quickly to bring partners on board. “There was a broad coalition of the willing coming at it from many different angles — private philanthropy, the corporate sector, and, of course, artists attached to cultural institutions and festivals,” said Blanchett.

The fund uses the term “displaced artists” rather than “refugee,” as the latter word “becomes almost a ghettoizing, stigmatizing and stereotypical label that prevents the word ‘artist’ coming front and center,” she added.

Koji Yanai, group senior executive officer at Uniqlo parent company Fast Retailing, said he met Blanchett at the UNHCR-organized Global Refugee Forum in 2023. “We connected over the desire to give a platform to displaced people and raise awareness about their stories through movies,” he told WWD.

The initiative is being launched as a pilot program, though “we expect the project [to] continue,” said Yanai.
Blanchett added that they had considered a larger program with up to 20 films, but the team recognized the need to act quickly and selected a smaller cohort of directors with plans to expand.

“As we gain more backers, the program will expand and may take on new formats,” said Yanai.
Blanchett described the Cannes launch as “a call to arms” for the industry. “We need those streaming platforms. We need those distributors and exhibitors to say, ‘We’re going to put these in front of [an audience],” she said. “Those conversations are very much on our mind.”

Full article on WWD

 
Google translated from Italian to English.

“The idea came up 18 months ago in the awareness that displacement is one of the great crises and challenges that humanity faces as a species . Unlike climate change, however, it is outside the mainstream conversation. We asked ourselves how to support these refugee artists and we thought of a fund”. This is how Cate Blanchett introduces, as part of the 78th Cannes Film Festival, the first Displacement Film Fund . The Oscar-winning actress is the spokesperson for this new grant program for short films presented by the Hubert Bals Fund of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). The press conference held in Cannes was the occasion to announce the five directors selected (in this first phase, a call for proposals was not opened) to make the first short films financed by the fund.

“This is a pilot program and it’s a learning process,” Blanchett continues. “I would have liked to support ten or twenty filmmakers, but right now we wanted filmmakers who already had experience in the film industry. There are so many organizations that focus on emerging cinema, that use it as a tool for healing and education. We decided to focus on established filmmakers who had an undeniable desire to make a film under 60 minutes.”

“I didn’t have the dream of becoming a director. I wanted to be a poet, even though I obviously loved cinema,” says Mo Harawe . “But when I was displaced, I didn’t know the language of the countries I was arriving in, so cinema became a way to express myself and talk to myself about my origins and my life. A sort of therapy. Returning to Somalia to shoot the short (between October and December) will be a way to rebuild the relationship with my country.”

Also present at the conference was Rajendra Roy , chief curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As co-chair of the Academy Awards International Feature Film Awards Executive Committee, he explained that the Academy will modify its rules to accommodate these refugee filmmakers and allow them to participate fully in the awards process.

“Creating these shorts will be exciting, fun, and touching on a human level,” Blanchett concludes. “It will allow us to reach an audience, get them out of their comfort zone, and break the stigma around these stories.”