Made of Truth: BFI Doc Society Short Film Fund (UK)

Since 2018, the Made of Truth: BFI Doc Society Short Film Fund (“Made of Truth”) has proudly supported 61 original, short documentaries. They’re delighted to open for a new round of funding and to discover new voices from across the UK over the next 3 years.

Core Priorities 

• They will apply the following six priorities when reviewing applications. These take in the three National Lottery strategic principles as well as the outcomes identified in the National Lottery strategy. You will be asked to address some of these directly in your application to them.
  • Equity, diversity and inclusion: addressing under-representation in perspective and representation, talent and recruitment, agency and opportunities, widening the range of voices and audiences served.
  • Impact and audience: supporting projects with a strong cultural or progressive impact for audiences.
  • Talent development and progression: supporting early career filmmakers (producers, writers and directors) and projects with a reasonable proportion of early career cast and crew.
  • Risk: supporting projects that take creative risks.
  • UK-wide: increasing the number of projects and filmmakers outside London and the South East, looking at location and representation.
  • Environmental sustainability: addressing sustainability both creatively and practically.
• In addition to these BFI priorities, Doc Society has identified its own priorities as follows:
  • Open collaboration: to develop new voices, to move beyond centres of power toward a truly distributed knowledge base and field building.
  • Representing all of UK society: to ensure the Fund is representative of society. Creating opportunities for new and emerging talent to access and build relationships as they intersect with the Fund. Attracting, keeping and then building careers in documentary storytelling from across the UK.
  • Freedom of creative expression: taking smart creative risks on documentary storytelling, in ways that develop and expand the documentary form.
  • Audience right to culture: working with a range of partners to help audiences and films and non-fiction immersive projects to find each other.

What support do filmmakers receive?

• Made of Truth provides grants of up to £25,000 towards the production and post production costs of non-fiction short films or immersive projects. Each award of funding is accompanied by creative oversight by Doc Society’s film and production executive, supported by the production coordinator and business affairs executive. As well as working with filmmakers prior to and during production, they may also advise awarded filmmakers on:
  • finding screening opportunities, regionally and further afield
  • potential collaborators for the project
  • festival strategies for the finished project
  • other means to gain industry exposure.

Eligibility Criteria

• Applications can be submitted by a project’s dedicated individual producer or, if no producer is attached to the project yet, by the project’s director, who in each case will be considered the ‘project lead’. The project lead will be the main point of contact for Doc Society regarding the application.
• They welcome applications from director-producer teams, but cannot accept applications from a director who is also acting as the dedicated individual producer of a project. In each case, both the individual producer and the director (and, if applicable, any dedicated writer of the project) must be UK resident.
• They highly encourage having a producer attached to your project at the time of application. If an application without a producer is accepted, the BFI Doc Society team can help you to find an appropriate producer.
• Where there is already a producer in place, they also may recommend you attach an additional producer to your project in cases where your team would benefit distinctly from this additional expertise.
• Final approval of funding can only be given once an individual producer is attached to the project and a production company is in place to receive the award. This company must be owned or co-owned by the individual producer, registered and centrally managed in the UK and the individual producer must also be a director of the company. This company will own the rights in the completed project.

For more information, visit Doc Society.