Deadline: 20-Sep-2025
Rough Edges and the Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation invite applications for the 2025–26 Documentary Film Fellowships to support artistic research, experimentation, and the creation of evocative films that explore innovative ideas and nuanced perspectives.
The Fellowships welcome 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. They seek to foreground the fragile, the marginal, the unexplored, the silenced and the othered—sites of existence subject to hierarchies of self and other, insider and outsider, pure and impure, normal and deviant, life and death—mediated by gender, caste, class, religion, sexual orientation, dis/ability, age, ethnicity, work and/or region. Whether through fragmentary encounters or in-depth engagements, the films should register and reaffirm these routinely invisibilised ordinaries, enabling conversations, possibilities, rituals and imaginings that foreground the other side. The aim is to explore how such stories and experiences, across diverse locations and shifting solidarities, can find form and language, challenge mainstream understandings, and be reimagined, reframed and resurrected.
The Fellowships are open to women, trans and queer filmmakers residing in India, applying as individuals, teams, or collectives. Voices from communities marginalised by caste, class, dis/ability, religion, ethnicity, work, or region are especially encouraged. Proposals can be in any language, with the final films subtitled in English, and should run between 40 and 60 minutes. Innovative formats and treatments are welcomed, and projects should be in early development or conceived for this call. Proposals for projects near completion or seeking only post-production funds are not eligible.
Three fellowships of ₹3,00,000 each will be awarded, with recipients committing to completing their films within eight to nine months. The process will be mentored in collaboration with Rough Edges and will include feedback from the Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation. Applicants must submit their proposals via the official submission form by 20 September 2025, with each applicant or team limited to one proposal.
The Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation, established to carry forth the legacy of Mrinalini Mukherjee and her family, supports visual art practitioners, scholars, and students, and fosters collaborations with cultural institutions. This fellowship is part of its mission to create platforms for innovative artistic expression.
For more information, visit Rough Edges.
