Screenwriting grants and development funds.

30 Oct 20266 days left

11 Nov 2026

2 Feb 2027

Closed for this cycle

The call opened on 19 May 2026 and closed at 17:30 on 31 July 2026, extended from an original date of 21 July. IMPORTANT: this is a one-off anniversary award, not an annual competition. It was launched to mark ESB's centenary and the festival's 25th anniversary, there is no prior cycle of any kind, and an archive search returns no earlier captures of the page. Do not expect a next window: if it recurs at all, that will be new information. Two errors on their own pages are worth knowing: the website gives the premiere as February 2026 while the guidelines correctly say February 2027, and the award appears under three different official names across the page, the guidelines PDF and the required email subject line.

Closed for this cycle

The 2026 round closed on 2 April 2026 at 5pm Central European time and 20 projects were announced in August. IFFR states that the 2027 deadline will be announced towards the end of 2026. The fund runs a single annual round; deadline dates for rounds before 2026 are not published.

Closed for this cycle

Round 1 2026 opened on 31 July and closed on 4 September 2026 at 11:59am NZST, a morning deadline. Recipients are announced on 30 October. Seed offers four grants of NZ$12,500 and Seed Advanced two of NZ$15,500 per round, each plus GST if applicable. NZWG's page now lists Round 1 only and announces no Round 2 dates; indicative dates it gave in August (opening 18 December 2026, closing 12 February 2027) are no longer published, so treat the next round as unannounced.

Rolling applications

Always open. Applications can be made at any time through Screen Australia's portal, with assessment taking approximately eight weeks from the point eligibility is confirmed. There are no rounds and no deadlines to plan around. The guidelines were issued on 1 July 2025 and updated on 2 July 2026, so the stable pattern here is annual guideline revision rather than an annual application window.

Rolling applications

Open all year with no deadlines. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis and decisions take up to six weeks from receipt of a completed form.

Closed for this cycle

The 2026 cycle is closed and no 2027 dates have been published. That cycle opened on 10 February 2026 with a regular deadline of 8 May at a 30 dollar fee and a final deadline of 22 May at 50 dollars. The fee is waived for SFFILM members, though the cheapest membership is 100 dollars a year. Submitting early confers no competitive advantage, and one fee covers a single application across several SFFILM narrative grants.

Closed for this cycle

The 2026 cycle is complete and no 2027 round has been announced anywhere. That cycle opened on 7 September 2025 and ran through six tiers to an extended deadline of 8 April 2026, with fees from 30 pounds at the lightning tier to 45 at extended for the main fund, and 25 to 35 for the First Time Filmmaker fund. Note the rules and the dates panel disagree on the final date, giving 5 April and 8 April respectively, with the only published time, 23:59 GMT, attached to the 5 April date. Nominees were notified on 6 July and the winner announced at the pitch event on 2 October 2026. The fund has run three years, so a further round is plausible but entirely unconfirmed.

Closed for this cycle

The 2026 application window ran from 11:00am Eastern on 19 May 2026 to 11:59pm Eastern on 21 June 2026, with judging through to the end of August and notification in autumn 2026. Tribeca now says the finalists' three-day workshop takes place in September 2026, though exact days are not given. This is the only entry in its group that publishes exact times and a timezone. The workshop shape is stable, at three days in New York in mid-to-late September with five finalists, but two things make the calendar unreliable: no cycle ran at all in 2023, and application windows for the 2024 and 2025 editions were never published, only their workshop dates.