Record Year of Entries: Announcing Our Film & TV Funding Award Shortlist 2025
We are thrilled to announce the shortlist for the Film & TV 2025 Funding Awards.
This year is our 10th anniversary and we received our highest number of entries yet—nearly double our previous record! The projects came from a whopping 86 countries around the globe and the quality of the submissions has been quite exceptional; all of which has made it incredibly difficult to narrow it down to just 14 final projects.
Our selection criteria emphasise director-led stories that offer unique access to compelling characters in interesting locations, bringing fresh perspectives on the world – and we were truly inundated with outstanding entries that showed us all of these things.
After extensive deliberation, we have carefully curated a shortlist of 14 projects that stood out for their originality and promise (listed below in alphabetical order). This shortlist will now undergo rigorous review by our esteemed panel of industry judges, including Fozia Khan, Head of Unscripted, Amazon Studios UK, David Green, TV and Film Director, and also Alan Whickers longest serving Producer, Oli Harbottle, Chief Content Officer at Dogwoof and Sam Soko, Nairobi-based documentary filmmaker . Once the judges have made their careful selection, we will unveil the five finalists who will have the opportunity to pitch their ideas pitch at Sheffield DocFest 2025. These finalists will compete for our prestigious £100,000 top award, as well as a runner-up contribution of £20,000.
We extend our heartfelt gratitude to all the applicants who have participated in this award. The continued increase in the number of submissions each year is a testament to the thriving creativity within the documentary filmmaking community. Thank you, and best of luck to all!
Without further ado, here is the shortlist for the Film & TV 2025 Funding Awards:
Childhood in the Mist | Warman Saeed and Edris Abdi | Iraq
Ayham is a 12-year-old Yazidi boy who survived being recruited by ISIS, but his mother is still missing. He lives with his uncle’s family in a refugee camp. His uncle wants to use Ayham’s case to save his family and get asylum in a European country but Ayham insists on staying to find his mother.
Echoes Underneath | Sumair Shamsi | Pakistan
Riaz, a Lahore, Pakistan-based sewer man strives against the indefinite marginalisation of Dalit Punjabi Christians. He leaps the generational dilemma by educating his four children despite mammoth socio-economic challenges.
Flotsam | Isa Shashikala Rao | United Kingdom
Flotsam follows an ageing fisherman and a young fish struggling to survive in Kazakhstan’s polluted capital Astana. This poetic tale explores capitalism, environmental decay, and the deep interconnectedness of human and animal conscious experiences in an increasingly industrialised world.
Homeboys | Luis Alonso Garibay Serrano and Alejandro Bernal Tejeda | Mexico
Roberto, a gang member and ex-convict deported from the U.S. to Mexico, holds a shelter for others like him. He struggles to redeem his past by trying to rescue his Homeboys. Exhausted, questioning his work and his own paternity, he travels to Tijuana to reconnect with his purpose and reunite with his son after almost 30 years.
Home Movie | Anu Czerwinski | Poland
Anu is a trans-masculine director, but when he visits his family he shaves his mustache and plays the role of beloved daughter and sister, Anna. With the help of his camera he tries to overcome the fear of coming-out while capturing a twisted family portrait with an epic courtroom finale.
M.O.S. Mute on Sound | Kenza Derkaoui | Canada
Director Mostafa Derkaoui returns after two decades to complete his unfinished film. Simultaneously, his granddaughter documents his artistic revival in a documentary that explores how cinema bridges the past and present.
Myth of Monsters | Beatrice Leong | Malaysia
How far will you fight to belong? Filmmaker Beatrice turns the camera on herself—unpacking a late autism diagnosis, medical injustices, and forced institutionalisation. Raw, intimate, she reveals how she finds hope to keep going after losing her youth, and her girlhood to being misunderstood by turning to activism and clapping back at a world who calls her a monster.
Pellong Pellong – The Untold Glitter of That Day | Hwijin Jude KANG | South Korea
Wan-soon is an 83-year-old woman living in Jeju island, South Korea, who paints at night. In her drawings, a painful tragedy unfolds that she was unable to talk about for 75 years. Now her drawings are being animated and begin a journey to heal her life-long-standing trauma.
Somewhere over the Rainbow | Koval Bhatia | India
An Indian woman travels across the world to reconnect with the father figure who shaped her childhood, only to realise over time that she doesn’t quite agree with the isolated life he built. After years of searching for home and belonging in distant places, she decides to go back to her roots, and embrace the contradictions and messy chaos of the life she wanted to escape.
Son of Lazio | Frank Eli Martin | United Kingdom
(Confidential Project)
The Quiet Part | Rachel Mueller | United States
When a pagan white supremacist group infiltrates a small town in rural America, residents must decide whether to resist and protest, or accept and normalise their new neighbours’ extremism. An unsettling look at the decisions that allow extremism to fester, the film explores how we construct identity, our common search for belonging, and what happens when that belonging is lost.
The Video Guy | Sam Howard and Alexander Dickerson | United Kingdom
Aged 18, Alexander Jay starts filming gangster rap videos with his friends. For over a decade he carries on as ‘the video guy’, recording their music videos and their lives trying to ‘make it big’. As prospects fade and tensions rise, Alex’s time as the video guy comes to an abrupt end, making him wonder what it was all for.
Umbrellas of The Acrobats | Mukesh Subramanaim | India
After a young acrobat realises his eyesight is failing, he uses his powers of imagination and storytelling to retain his foothold in a nomadic circus community in Southern India.
When a Poet Goes to War | Aung Niang Soe | Thailand
When peaceful protests fail to sway the country’s dictator, a Burmese poet and his fellow artists pick up arms to fight the well-resourced military junta. Deep in the jungles they are gaining ground, but the former pacifists struggle with the mental and physical realities of a brutal war.