FilmNomad Founder Nomintuya Baasankhuu at Locarno 2026
FilmNomad founder and director Nomintuya Baasankhuu represented Mongolia at the 79th Locarno Film Festival as part of Open Doors Connect, the programme’s new strand supporting South-to-South collaboration between film professionals from Benin, Madagascar, Brazil and Mongolia.
This was her second time at Open Doors — she first attended in 2021 as a fellow, an experience that directly inspired the founding of FilmNomad two years later. Returning in 2026, this time as the head of an established programme, closed a circle.
Running alongside Open Doors’ second year of its four-edition Africa cycle, the programme placed Nomintuya within a cohort of producers and institution-builders from across the African continent — including participants from Zimbabwe, Côte d’Ivoire, Cabo Verde, Burkina Faso and Nigeria — for a week of intensive mentoring, industry meetings and networking. The programme was mentored by Fibby Kioria (Kenya) and Mitchell Harper (South Africa).
Over six days, FilmNomad held continuous meetings — from 10am to 6pm daily — with international funds, producers, sales agents, distributors and festival programmers, presenting both its training programmes and its slate of Mongolian projects in development.
The most rewarding part of the week was the response to FilmNomad itself:
“What moved me was hearing filmmakers react to what FilmNomad actually is. People kept telling me how unique it is, how nourishing — and they saw it as something larger than a national programme. FilmNomad can be a bridge: a route between cinemas that rarely reach each other directly. That contribution to world cinema is what people responded to. Almost everyone I met asked how they could apply.”
— Nomintuya Baasankhuu, Founder & Director South-to-South Ecosystems & Shared Challenges
Equally valuable were the conversations between participants. Across the week, filmmakers from Africa and Latin America exchanged the challenges they face in their own industries — training gaps, financing structures, distribution routes — and explored how to build better ecosystems for filmmakers working outside traditional centres. Solving the same problems in parallel, and finally comparing notes, proved one of the most inspiring aspects of the programme.
Locarno also offered the pleasure of reconnecting with Émilie Pianta-Essadi (La Fabrique Cinéma), Nikola Joetze (Berlinale Talents) and Meret Ruggle (trigon-film), all of whom mentored FilmNomad’s programme this year.
On the Piazza Grande
Beyond the industry programme, the festival itself was a reminder of why the work matters. Two nights on the Piazza Grande — where 8,000 people gather beneath one of the world’s largest open-air screens — brought James Gray’s Paper Tiger and Olivia Wilde’s The Invite. The Open Doors Screenings, meanwhile, offered the discovery of a remarkable new generation of African filmmakers.
Acknowledgements
FilmNomad extends its sincere gratitude to Zsuzsi Bánkuti and Sarah Schiesser of Open Doors for making this partnership possible, to mentors Fibby Kioria and Mitchell Harper, and to the entire Open Doors team at the Locarno Film Festival.