Film and TV Previous Winners

Submissions Date Announced for 2017/2018 Awards

Want to be in with the chance of winning up to £80k in funding for your film or radio documentary? 

Whicker’s World Foundation are thrilled to announce that we are opening this year’s round applications for our Film & TV and audio awards on September 18th 2017. The closing date for our 2017/2018 documentary awards is midnight GMT on 31st January 2018.

We have upped the RAFA (Radio and Audio Award) to £6,000, with a runner-up prize of £3000 and will be announcing seismic changes to our criteria in the coming months.

The Film & TV Funding Award is an £80,000 development pot for an original idea for an authored documentary. Our awards are international and there’s no application fee.

Last year’s awards saw Thai-American documentary Pailin Wedel scoop £80,000 for her documentary Hope Frozen, about a Buddhist scientist from Bangkok who decided to cryo-preserve his daughter’s brain after she died of cancer aged 2 years old. This makes her the youngest person ever to go through this process. 

Runner-up Duncan Cowles, from Edinburgh, won £15,000 for this documentary Silent Men, a sideways glance at toxic masculinity and its affect on men in the UK.

Winner Pailin Wedel accepts her award at Sheffield Doc/Fest

Aside from our Film and TV Funding Award, we are also opening applications for our RAFED and RAFA Awards for radio documentary. 

The RAFED (Recognition Award for Exceptional Documentary) is a £3,000 prize to congratulate an extraordinary audio documentary broadcast in the last year (between January 31st 2017 and January 31st 2018). This year’s runner-up prize of £1000.

There were two joint winners for this award last year- Cicely Fell, for DustBowl Ballads, on Oklahoma’s ‘No Man’s Land’ – a region that was the heart of the 1930s Dust Bowl and Eleanor McDowall for A Dancer Dies Twice, a moving documentary about what happens when an instrument as finely tuned as a dancer’s body begins to change. The runner-up was John Fecile for Blink Once For Yes which followed the story of his family’s struggle to find the best path after his brother sustained a traumatic brain injury aged just 20.

The RAFA is a unique development award that this year will offer £6,000 to a producer with a outstanding idea for a radio documentary. The runner-up prize has been upped this year to £3,000 in order to empower more new radio talent to have their work brought to life through our funding.

Last year’s winner was Tom Glasser for his programme Sounds Inside, a powerful soundscape of HM Brixton prison that will explore whether sound itself can be a form of punishment. Jodie Taylor won the runner-up prize for her idea for a series of audio diaries of Syrian refugees living in Europe. The series, a A New Normal, will kick off with Sidra’s Story. The Foundation also decided to award a discretionary £1000 prize to Michelle Thomas for I’m Not OK: the Mental Health Podcast

Tom Glasser (right) and Carl Cattermole (left), winners of the 2017 RAFA

We are very excited to welcome applications from around the world this year from 18th September. You can read the criteria for each award here as well as the individual terms and conditions here. Our awards are entirely inclusive and judged by an expert panel of industry judges, hand-picked each year to help find and fund the best new documentary talent.

Good luck to all of our applicants!