foregrounding the untold and the obscured
Rough Edges and Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation are delighted to announce
Documentary Film Fellowships 2025-26 that seek to support artistic research,
experiments with form and practice and the crafting of compelling and evocative films
that give expression to innovative ideas and enquiries, offering invigorating readings
of diverse and complex lived realities, with nuance, depth and texture.
This Call for proposals is now closed.
We thank everyone who has shared their ideas and proposals with us, for such an overwhelming and splendid response.
The proposals are currently being reviewed by the Jury.
We expect to announce the selections by the end of November 2025.
For any queries, please write to info@roughedgesfoundation.org
The Fellowships will support three projects to explore the theme The Other Side.
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We invite 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. Despite being integral to our interconnected material, social, cultural, political and emotional lives and worlds, we render insignificant and peripheral, even adversarial, to our attention, discourses, conventions and articulations, the fragile, the marginal, the unexplored, the silenced and the othered. These make up sites of existence subject to hierarchies of self and other, insider and outsider, pure and impure, normal and deviant, life and death, mediated by our gender, caste, class, religion, sexual orientation, dis/ability, age, ethnicity, work and/ or region. Whether through fragmentary encounters or intense and in-depth engagements, we register, record and reaffirm these ordinaries routinely invisibilised, enabling conversations, possibilities, rituals and imaginings, which foreground the other side.
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āWe hope for these films to explore how these stories and experiences, individual and collective, challenging and liberating, across myriad locations, shifting contexts and solidarities, can find form, language and creative expression, even as they challenge mainstream and exclusionary understandings, boundaries and assumptions. How they can stake claim to being spoken about, chronicled and even being reimagined, reframed and resurrected.
call for proposals
fellowship notes
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The Fellowships are open to women, trans and queer filmmakers, resident in India, who may apply as individuals, teams or as collectives. Applicants are at liberty to propose and work with co-applicants, collaborators and team members, irrespective of how they identify. We especially encourage voices belonging to groups marginalised on the basis of their caste, class, dis/ability, religion, ethnicity, work and/ or region.
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We encourage innovative formats and treatments that best complement your artistic vision.
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The proposed projects could be between 40 and 60 minutes in duration.
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They may be in any language - those that most intricately capture the specificities and depths of their subjects. In the interest of outreach, the final films will need to carry subtitles in English.
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We aim to award three fellowships of Rs 3,00,000/- each.
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We would prefer to commission projects developed in response to this call or those in early stages of development, but are open to proposals that derive from earlier projects or expand current ones already underway. If your project is close to completion, has a rough cut or is in need of post-production/ finishing funds only, this Fellowship is not the right one for you.
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In all cases, please propose ideas and budgets commensurate with the size of the Fellowship.
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An Applicant/ team of Applicants can submit only one proposal for consideration under this Call.
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In the case of commissioning, Applicants commit to completing their films in a period of eight-nine months.
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These will be mentored fellowships, developed in dialogue with Rough Edges and feedback from the Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation.
proposal submission terms
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RE and MMF are not bound to honour incomplete proposals, those that do not reach us or reach us after the submission deadline.
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RE and MMF will not be responsible should multiple proposals explore similar ideas. We may select any or none of them.
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Decisions of the Fellowship Jury will be final.āā
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the jury
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The Jury for the selection of proposals for the Fellowships comprises Professor Sabeena Gadihoke as independent juror, Team Rough Edges and Team MMF.
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Sabeena Gadihoke is Professor at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi, where she teaches courses in Digital Media Arts, Documentary, Cinematography and Photography Studies. She has worked as an independent documentary filmmaker and cameraperson. Her book Camera Chronicles (Mapin/Parzor, 2006) is a biography of Homai Vyarawalla, India’s first woman press photographer. Sabeena is also a photo historian and curator, whose recent projects include Twin Sisters with Cameras: An Exhibition of photographs by Debalina Mazumder and Manobina Roy (co-curated) in Delhi, Calcutta, Bangalore, Lucknow and Hyderabad (2022-24). She has also curated Light Works, a retrospective of photographer Jitendra Arya, at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai and Bangalore (2017-2018) and several shows on Homai Vyarawalla, including a retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore (2010-2011). Her research interests focus on the intersection of the still and moving image, she has written on contemporary documentary, meta-histories of photography, visual popular culture and female stardom in Bombay cinema. She is on the academic bodies of several universities, has served on various juries and is currently a member of the editorial committee of Trans Asia Photography.
The Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation (MMF) is a visual arts non-profit established in accordance with the vision of artist Mrinalini Mukherjee, to carry forth the legacy of the Mukherjee family which include her parents, the critically acclaimed modernist Benode Behari Mukherjee and artist-educator Leela Mukherjee. Their legacy, in the form of their archives, has been digitised and is shared with new audiences through curatorial and publishing initiatives. As a charitable organisation, MMF also supports visual art practitioners, scholars, students and builds strategic partnerships with other cultural institutions to grow the art ecosystem in India in equitable ways.