Through our Film Fellowships, we seek to enable, mentor and produce innovative and affective documentary films that explore diverse, intersecting and complex gendered realities, boldly informed by feminist and queer politics and a commitment to social justice. Supporting films across multiple political and aesthetic practices, we celebrate the distinctive voices of women, trans and queer artists, across locations and contexts. Through the making and sharing of these films, we engage with intention, perspective, process, form and expression and how they resonate in a structurally intricate and unequal world.
The Fellowships engage with critical themes that mandate a greater number and diversity of voices and interpretations, inspired by lived realities, to initiate, expand, intensify and deepen those discourses. We aspire to supporting passionate and evocative films informed by authenticity, those that make others worlds seem possible and those that few others might support.
​
Commissioned in response to open calls for proposals, we support first-time artists and those with experience, individuals and teams, those speaking from deeply personal spaces and long-held political commitments, voices that acknowledge privilege and those that question erasure from public cultures, those rooted in the present moment and those that have grown with movements, together representing several intersectional possibilities.
​
Commissioned filmmakers have creative autonomy over their films, developed in dialogue with the Rough Edges Team. The meaningful exchange we attempt to build, nuances both processes and pursuits, allowing for mutual sharing and learning, producing attentively, with intention, joy, courage and vulnerability.
​
Like every meaningful relationship,
documentary making is deeply transformative.
Creative imagination and expression have historically been mediated by unjust hierarchies of gender, caste, patriarchy, heteronormativity, class, religion, majoritarianism and ableism.
LOST AND FOUND IN THE NORMAL FELLOWSHIPS 2026-27 (ongoing)
Artistic explorations, expressions, impressions and ruminations that foreground diverse and complex gendered experiences of mental health and narratives of those living with and navigating mental illness and distress, situating them at the very centre of their stories.
​
THE OTHER SIDE FELLOWSHIPS 2025-26 (ongoing)
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.​
​
UNCODE FELLOWSHIPS 2022-24
Our inaugural fellowships, Uncode supported ten short documentaries by women, queer, non-binary and gender fluid artists, that explore and visibilise diverse, lived experiences, expressions and reflections on gender, finding and framing the everyday stories of gendered lives – challenging, hopeful, joyous, resilient, often invisiblised, erased or homogenised.
