Rough Edges and Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation are delighted to announce Documentary Film Fellowships 2026-27 that seek to support and mentor visual arts practitioners, working across mediums and forms, to expand their practice and experiment with documentary filmmaking. The Fellowships will facilitate multidisciplinary artistic research, interactions and explorations, enabling the crafting of compelling documentary films, especially in mixed media formats, which give expression to innovative ideas and enquiries, offering invigorating readings of diverse and complex lived realities, with nuance, depth and texture.

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We invite feminist enquiries, narratives, speculations and reflections that explore myriad relationships, expressions, inheritances, transgressions and everyday intimate encounters between gender and language and how they shape, transform and disrupt each other.

 

The Fellowships will support three projects.

THE CALL

To belong is to be legible in the codes that define us. Gender and language constitute, mould and constrain us, anchoring our lives and worlds, emotions, beliefs and experiences in fundamental and profound ways. They frame who we are and how we think, dream, remember, struggle, desire, transmit memories, histories and knowledge and make sense of our selves, others and the communities to which we belong.

 

Language is an embodied form of meaning-making – meanings we share with others, those that speak only to us, those we forget, those that fade, those that refuse to die and those that we create anew. It is how we learn, convince, love, argue, shame, dissent, mock, seduce, hate, offend, inform and misinform. Generated and reiterated in particular social and political contexts, language represents and reproduces gendered norms and power dynamics. Through everyday words, labels, diktats, judgements, pronouns, stereotypes, jokes, insults and forms of address, we are constantly disciplined as gendered beings. Patriarchy enlists language to legitimise the hierarchies of gender and to privilege masculine language and word forms as universal, supposedly representing all of humanity and its varied experiences. Gendered practices of language perpetuate sexism and misogyny; entrench suffocating binaries; regulate access to forms of speech, reading and writing and burden language – like women, with cultural purity and morality. Women’s bodies and sexualities become sites where language too is sexualised, weaponised and used to control, troll and abuse. Women’s speech is disciplined into being polite, tentative, accommodating and silent, fortifying the linguistic authority of men. Obscenity and offence are invoked over particular forms of expression, when used by women, queer, non-binary and trans persons, even as the apparatuses of the state, law, society and popular culture perpetuate cultures of objectification, subordination and violence. Through formal and informal performances of everyday language, vocabulary and communication, our lived realities are trivialised and invisibilised.

 

Language has historically been a contested and complex terrain of power, negotiating multiple hegemonies alongside those of gender. The languages we speak in and those that speak of us embody the weight of hierarchies of caste, class, religion, heteronormativity, nationalism, majoritarianism, displacement, colonialism, sanskritisation, globalisation, capitalism, regionalism, ableism – and more. They create boundaries, prescribing who gets to speak and in what ways, who sets the tone, who is interrupted, whose voice carries authority and whose speech is controlled, censored, criminalised and penalised -  questions not of language, but of the structures in which language is embedded and, those it, in turn, reinforces.

 

Through our names, accents, vocabularies, intonations, dialects, scripts, commands, access, fluency, sounds and mediums, language becomes symbol, identification, classification and qualification, producing us in particular ways - us and them, pure and impure, cultured and backward, citizen and foreigner, insider and outsider, normal and abnormal, public and private, national and vernacular, respectable and deviant, national and anti-national, loyal and seditious and countless other labels. Some languages become worthy of existence and others of erasure. Scripts wither in the face of dominant ones. Several languages have been lost forever, and with them, cultures, testimonies, wisdom and knowledge systems that represented entire worlds. When a language is elevated as the sole language of education, aspiration, privilege and mobility, or of national heritage and glory, others are subordinated, particularly those belonging to fragile communities and those distant from nodes of power. Yet, when those excluded adopt, adapt and excel, territorial anxieties find aggressive expression.

 

Reclamation empowers language as resistance, agency and movement, in the refusal to disappear into someone else’s curation of one’s being. Excavation, revitalisation, reimagination and translation are meaningful political interventions and acts of discovery, labour and assertion, which radically reshape how gender and power are expressed and negotiated. This resolute persistence of languages, perspectives and voices challenges dominant assumptions and narratives, enabling the unheard to speak for themselves and demand attention, space and authority.

 

Language is a site of multiple, simultaneous and contradictory personal and collective, affective and transformative experiences, both oppressive and liberating - the expansiveness that allows one to find oneself; the alienation and suffocation of language that creates us but cannot contain who we become, and our stories; the expression of our desires and rebellions; the trauma of abusive insults and the burden of shame; the possibility of being saved by language alone; legacies through which the distant, dead and bygone continue to live amidst us; the decline of multilingual practices and the devaluation of scripts; institutional and statutory languages that generate us; informal, vernacular and everyday languages that reiterate but also subvert these constructions; transcending barriers and borders of bodies, minds, communities and nations; the sharpness and violence of speech; the language of grief, joy, hope, upheaval and political representation; the indigenous, oral, local and folk; the repository of diverse vocabularies, expressions, histories and traditions; bodies, places and objects that carry the archives and travels of several languages; unfamiliar intimacies of the tongue that delight and the extraordinary gorgeousness of those that cannot be touched, held or felt in another language.

 

We invite proposals that engage with gender and language through unconventional, textured, interdisciplinary, expansive and experimental modes. Films that explore multiple gendered language realities, histories, materialities, diversities, hierarchies, negotiations, subversions, frictions, fragments, myths and emotions. Those that contemplate how through acts of doing and undoing gender and language, in their diverse and lived rigidities, fragilities, porosities and fluidities, we recognise, record, restore, contest, reframe and celebrate our connections, relationships and revolutions, in, of and beyond the languages we inherit and those we choose to make our own.

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FELLOWSHIP NOTES

• The Fellowships are open to Indian women, non-binary, trans and queer visual artists, above 18 years of age, currently resident in India, who may apply as individuals or as teams. 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 communities marginalised on the basis of their caste, class, religion, dis/ability, ethnicity, work and/ or region.

• We are open to a wide range of visual arts practitioners, engaged in painting, sculpture, mural making, textile, printmaking, installation art, performance art, lens, media-based and mixed media art, among others.

• We seek innovative formats and treatments that best complement your artistic vision.

• The proposed projects could be between 40 and 60 minutes in duration, with a maximum budget of INR 3,00,000/-, though budgets will vary across projects, based on their respective requirements.

• Ideas and budgets should be commensurate with the size of the Fellowship.

• The films 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.

• We will commission projects developed in response to this Call or those in very early stages of development. Projects that have a rough cut or are in need of post-production/ finishing funds only, will not be considered.

• We are not open to co-productions under these Fellowships.

• We discourage proposals generated using AI tools. If AI tools are utilised, please specify the purpose and extent of their support.

• An applicant/ team of applicants can submit only one proposal for consideration under this Call.

• In the case of commissioning, applicants commit to completing their films in a period of eight-nine months.

• These will be mentored fellowships, developed in dialogue with Rough Edges and feedback from the Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation.

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SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

• Proposals can be submitted through one of the following methods:

  • Online Proposal Submission Form, in English, available here

  • Downloadable Form to be submitted over email, in English, available here. Please fill it and send it, in .pdf format only, to info@roughedgesfoundation.org, with the subject Proposal for Doing/Undoing Fellowships.

  • A recorded Video Proposal in English, not exceeding 15 minutes, that addresses all the Project Information (Part II) and Subject, Artistic Vision and Proposed Treatment (Part III) questions in the Proposal Submission Form. The Video must not include any teaser or excerpts. Please email the link for the downloadable Video Proposal, in .mp4 format only, along with your Personal Information and Artist Portfolio, to info@roughedgesfoundation.org, with the subject Proposal for Doing/Undoing Fellowships.

• Applicants who wish to submit their proposals in languages other than English should write to us at info@roughedgesfoundation.org with the details, before 31 October 2026, so we can assess and communicate our capacity and possible plan to process your proposals.

• In case you have any difficulty with proposal submission or have any accessibility concerns, please write to us and we will try our best to enable your submission.

• The deadline for submissions is the end of 15 November 2026.

• For any queries, write to info@roughedgesfoundation.org

 

PROPOSAL SUBMISSION TERMS

• Rough Edges and MMF are not bound to honour incomplete proposals, those that do not reach us or reach us after the submission deadline.

• Rough Edges and MMF will not be responsible should multiple proposals explore similar ideas. We may select any or none of them.

• Decisions on the selection of proposals, by the Fellowship Jury, comprising Rough Edges, MMF and an independent juror, will be final.

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