Rough Edges Arts and Media is a documentary arts initiative nurturing bold non-fiction cinema rooted in feminist and queer politics, with a deep commitment to social justice and independent expression. Its work spans enabling, mentoring, producing and circulating films that open up difficult questions and create space for unheard voices.
Rough Edges imagines film as both language and catalyst, supporting artists to experiment with form while tracing intersecting realities around gender, caste, class, disability, religion, region and sexuality. The initiative commissions and closely collaborates with filmmakers through the creative journey—holding space for intention, process and expression—so that films can resonate in a structurally unequal world and spark public dialogue.
The team works to contest dominant codes of cultural production, build countercultures and expand visual references for the documentary, especially at a time when support for independent non-fiction is shrinking. By pairing rigorous mentorship with imaginative risk-taking, Rough Edges helps creators push boundaries and shape films that question power, offer solace and galvanise communities.
Through fellowships and calls for proposals, Rough Edges backs women, trans and queer filmmakers across languages and locations, encouraging innovative treatments and mid-length works. Recent fellowships, including collaborations with arts foundations, provide funding, structured feedback and an eight-to-nine-month runway from development to completion, centring projects born in early conception.
Beyond production, the initiative showcases and disseminates films in varied contexts—often alongside other art forms—to sustain creative networks, strengthen people’s movements and support pedagogical use of documentary. This circulation strategy aims to grow audiences for non-fiction in an intensely visual, hyperdigital world, and to make space for deliberation and new alliances.
Rough Edges is led by Ridhima Mehra and Tulika Srivastava, drawing on decades of commissioning, curation and outreach, including stewardship of hundreds of films that have travelled globally and received major honours. An advisory group of feminist artists, editors, legal advocates and curators anchors the initiative’s artistic and political commitments, shaping its evolving practice.
At its heart, Rough Edges champions films that make other worlds feel possible—works of authenticity that take formal risks while speaking from and to lived realities. It is a home for documentary as collective memory-making, where shifting who tells the story also transforms how the story is told.
