UK screen organisations can apply for funding ranging from £12,000 to £150,000

The BFI National Lottery Creative Challenge Fund has reopened, with an added focus on early career and experienced independent producers as well as genre projects.

The aim is to find organisations to create and deliver targeted project development programmes for features or immersive projects; with a broadened scope, applicants are invited to respond to one of multiple challenges which aim to address underrepresentation, target specific areas of need and to stimulate growth in the industry.

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. 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.

This year’s Fund has opened out beyond the focus on genres, to shine a light on UK independent producers, and in line with this, the BFI Development Fund has increased producer fees from £2,000 to £3,000 per stage.

The 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.

Mia Bays, director of the BFI Filmmaking Fund, said: “We established this Fund to encourage and enable our industry to help us to approach project development differently, and the response we got to the first challenge was inspiring. We supported fantastic programmes which attracted projects that the lab leaders felt have major potential but may not have been on the usual radars. The changes we have made to the Fund and the emphasis on supporting independent producers, see us responding to what we are hearing from industry and focusing on where we believe the Fund can have the greatest impact.”

Full details can be found here.