With support from the Swiss Foreign Ministry's Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), Open Doors aims to support and highlight films and filmmakers from the South and the East, where independent filmmaking is vulnerable, via a focus on a different region every year. The next edition will explore Sub-Saharan Africa, following the spotlight on Francophone African countries in 2012. 2014 will cover the following nations, which did not participate in 2012:
Angola, Botswana, Cape Verde, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, São Tomé and Príncipe, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Southern Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The Festival will select a dozen projects from the region to participate in Open Doors 2014. The objective of the co-production lab (August 9-12) is to bring the finalist projects' directors and producers together with potential partners, to encourage support for these projects to come to fruition.