BFI Doc Society Fund team and decision making process

Assessment stages and how they’re structured

Doc Society is committed to transparency and accountability and recognises that filmmakers need to know who is making funding decisions and how they are arrived at.

In each copy of BFI Doc Society funding guidelines you will find a clear outline of what happens after your application is entered. Alongside decision-making criteria the guidelines set out how each assessment stage is structured, who is involved, and how long you should expect to receive an application outcome.

We work with external readers and peer reviewers across each fund. These readers are contracted annually and have been appointed through an open recruitment process. They bring specific experience of independent non-fiction film or immersive production, financing, distribution and exhibition. To ensure the independence of their reviews we do not publish the names of readers and peer reviewers during their contract.

We require internal or external readers to acknowledge all potential conflicts of interest—financial, personal, or professional—between themselves and applicants. Once a conflict of interest is declared the internal or external reader is excluded from all stages of assessment of the application.