The British Film Institute has announced more than £1.7 million in new awards through the UK Global Screen Fund, alongside three agency appointments for the next phase of international promotion under ScreenUK. The package combines support for production partnerships with grants to help UK films reach audiences abroad.
Seven projects will share £1,233,203 through the fund’s International Co-production strand. A further £510,109 will go through International Distribution, bringing the two award totals to £1,743,312. The co-production slate comprises five feature films, including two documentaries, and two animated television series. The seven UK independent companies are working with partners across 13 territories.
New production partnerships
The latest round marks the fund’s first supported co-productions involving North Macedonia, Malaysia, India and Portugal. The other partner territories are Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, Norway and Spain. Across the slate, the projects range from television animation for young children to documentary features and dramatic films.
The stories also span markedly different subjects. One documentary follows a journey into the Amazon and engages with the environmental and humanitarian pressures facing Yanomami communities. Another is set in the Yakut tundra and follows a young Dolgan reindeer herder weighing an ancestral way of life against the modern mammoth-tusk trade. Other funded works include a period drama about Mary Wollstonecraft, a feature exploring the legacy of Indian cinema and a dystopian story from a Mexican writer-director.
International co-production support is intended to help UK companies develop and make work with overseas partners, rather than simply buy completed films for domestic release. Such partnerships can bring together producers, creative contributors and financing from more than one country. The fund describes its co-production support as a means of sharing intellectual property and revenue, while backing film and television projects with potential audiences.
Help for international releases
The distribution awards use two routes: Festival Launch grants and Prints and Advertising support. Festival Launch funding helps projects reach major international festivals, while P&A grants support the release of a single UK film across groups of at least four international territories. Five films named for the latter support are & Sons, Everybody Digs Bill Evans, On the Sea, Sunny Dancer and Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day.
The BFI says the fund has now made 190 International Distribution awards, worth £4.6 million in total. The latest co-production round brings that strand’s cumulative awards above £11.6 million across 73 projects and partnerships with 37 territories. These totals provide a sense of the programme’s accumulated reach; they do not indicate the eventual audience or commercial performance of any individual film.
A wider export programme
The awards arrive as the fund enters an expanded period, with its annual budget rising from £7 million to more than £18 million for 2026 to 2029. The wider programme also includes newer support for video-game releases, development slates and minimum guarantees for film sales. A majority co-production offer focused on animation and documentaries is planned for a later launch.
Alongside grants, the new ScreenUK promotional framework is intended to coordinate the UK screen sector’s presence at international festivals and markets, as well as its digital campaigns. Premier PR has been appointed for events and logistics and digital promotion and production; Manchester-based Music will deliver creative assets; and Four Marketing and Media will handle paid-media planning and campaigns. The agencies will report to the BFI and work with industry partners over the three-year framework.
Together, the production awards, release support and promotional appointments cover different stages of international activity: making projects with overseas partners, preparing films for festivals and release, and presenting UK screen work in global markets. The new awards are one round within a broader export-support programme, rather than a guarantee of sales or distribution outcomes for the projects involved.
