BFI Creative Challenge Fund reopens 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. In line with this focus on supporting UK independent producers, this coincides with the BFI Development Fund increasing producer fees from £2,000 to £3,000 per stage. 

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.  

“We established this fund to encourage and enable our industry to help us to approach project development differently,” says Mia Bays, Director of the BFI Filmmaking Fund, “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.” 

The BFI Creative Challenge Fund can support labs for fiction and documentary features (live action or animation) and narrative immersive film work. It has been set up to complement the BFI Filmmaking Fund’s current Development funding. Changing to a rolling fund, and inviting applications for short and long term projects, allows the fund to be more flexible and responsive to need across the UK.  

Applicants to the fund can be flexible in their approach – offering short, intense labs or programmes that run over a number of months – and can include a range of tools and mechanisms such as script editors and mentors as well as actors, filming, editing, testing and market expertise. Facilitators are also asked to ensure participants are paid for their time attending the programmes.   

Funding eight labs through its first round, the fund supported programmes across the UK which responded to the initial challenge of genre projects from new and emerging filmmakers. The labs, which included the UK Next Wave Genre Lab from Film Constellation, The Residency from Story Compound, Funny Features from Glasgow Film Theatre, and Develop-CreateXR  from Screen South, supported a diverse cohort of 86 projects from 130 dynamic writers, directors and producers.