BFI REOPENS CREATIVE CHALLENGE FUND WITH ADDED FOCUS ON INDIE PRODUCERS

BFI REOPENS CREATIVE CHALLENGE FUND WITH ADDED FOCUS ON INDIE PRODUCERS   

The BFI National Lottery Creative Challenge Fund reopens today seeking applications from UK screen organisations to create and deliver targeted project development programmes for features or immersive projects. Awarding between £12,000 to £150,000 per programme, applicants must respond to one of multiple challenges to create development labs to focus on: early career producers; independent producers with ambitious projects of scale; or emerging filmmakers with genre projects. The Fund, which will invest a further £1.7m before March 2026, is now open on a rolling basis, and organisations can apply for short or long-term programmes.   

The BFI Creative Challenge Fund was established to energise the development offer for UK independent filmmaking. By supporting organisations to devise and deliver labs and workshops, the Fund aims to decentralise project development and stimulate a healthier and more diverse ecosystem for UK talent. The BFI seeks applicants who can create labs designed to maximise the chances of projects securing further development finance and/or financial support in the marketplace. Increasing the funding available, creative development projects supporting early career creatives working at pre-debut levels may be supported with funding from BFI NETWORK.  

The expansion of the Fund follows learnings from the first round, but also with input from industry and recently published analysis and research to address the key challenges in the project development process. Alongside genre, the two new challenges focus on UK independent producers, recognising the acute challenges they face including the limited opportunities available to develop multiple projects and business strategies.  

One new challenge for this Fund calls for programmes to support early career creative producers, as the current funding landscape often offers producers’ low remuneration for what usually end up as being long stints in project development. The other aims to capitalise on the opportunity opened up by the recently introduced Independent Film Tax Credit (IFTC), calling for programmes to support more experienced producers with ambitious projects of scale, meeting a different set of challenges.

All three challenges are open to support labs with a focus on project development for animation features and we have highlighted this as a priority gap on the website and guidelines.

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