Documentary Film Fellowships: Call for proposals | Deadline 20 Sep 2025

Call for Proposals

The Fellowships will support three projects to explore the theme The Other Side.

We invite feminist enquiries, narratives, speculations and reflections on alternative, different, unconventional, unheard and neglected experiences, realities, connections, forms of knowledge, histories, livelihoods, beliefs, practices and routines of life and living. Despite being integral to our interconnected material, social, cultural, political and emotional lives and worlds, we render insignificant and peripheral, even adversarial, to our attention, discourses, conventions and articulations, the fragile, the marginal, the unexplored, the silenced and the othered. These make up sites of existence subject to hierarchies of self and other, insider and outsider, pure and impure, normal and deviant, life and death, mediated by our gender, caste, class, religion, sexual orientation, dis/ability, age, ethnicity, work and/ or region. Whether through fragmentary encounters or intense and in-depth engagements, we register, record and reaffirm these ordinaries routinely invisibilised, enabling conversations, possibilities, rituals and imaginings, which foreground the other side. 

We hope for these films to explore how these stories and experiences, individual and collective, challenging and liberating, across myriad locations, shifting contexts and solidarities, can find form, language and creative expression, even as they challenge mainstream and exclusionary understandings, boundaries and assumptions. How they can stake claim to being spoken about, chronicled and even being reimagined, reframed and resurrected.

Fellowship Notes

• The Fellowships are open to women, trans and queer filmmakers, resident in India, who may apply as individuals, teams or as collectives. Applicants are at liberty to propose and work with co-applicants, collaborators and team members, irrespective of how they identify. We especially encourage voices belonging to groups marginalised on the basis of their caste, class, dis/ability, religion, ethnicity, work and/ or region. 

• We encourage innovative formats and treatments that best complement your artistic vision.

• The proposed projects could be between 40 and 60 minutes in duration.

• They may be in any language - those that most intricately capture the specificities and depths of their subjects. In the interest of outreach, the final films will need to carry subtitles in English.

• We aim to award three fellowships of Rs 3,00,000/- each.

•  We would prefer to commission projects developed in response to this call or those in early stages of development, but are open to proposals that derive from earlier projects or expand current ones already underway. If your project is close to completion, has a rough cut or is in need of post-production/ finishing funds only, this Fellowship is not the right one for you.
• In all cases, please propose ideas and budgets commensurate with the size of the Fellowship.

• An Applicant/ team of Applicants can submit only one proposal for consideration under this Call.

• In the case of commissioning, Applicants commit to completing their films in a period of eight-nine months.

• These will be mentored fellowships, developed in dialogue with Rough Edges and feedback from the Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation.

Submission Guidelines

• The Proposal Submission Form is available here 

• Please do not submit proposals/ concepts over email.

• The deadline for submissions is 20 September 2025.

• In case you have difficulty filling the Form due to accessibility concerns, please write to us and we will try our best to enable your submission.

• For any queries, write to info@roughedgesfoundation.org

Proposal Submission Terms

• RE and MMF are not bound to honour incomplete proposals, those that do not reach us or reach us after the submission deadline.

• RE and MMF will not be responsible should multiple proposals explore similar ideas. We may select any or none of them.

• Decisions on the selection of proposals, by the Fellowship Jury, comprising RE, MMF and an independent juror, will be final.

Rough Edges enables, mentors, produces and disseminates imaginative documentary films that explore diverse, intersecting and complex gendered realities, boldly informed by feminist and queer politics and a commitment to social justice. Supporting films across multiple political and aesthetic practices, we celebrate the distinctive voices of women, trans and queer artists, especially from the margins, collectively catalysing conversations around contemporary narratives and how they shape us. Through the making and sharing of films, we aspire to engage with intention, perspective, process, form and expression and how they resonate in a structurally intricate and unequal world.