Apply now: Connections through Culture Grants 2025

The British Council’s Connections Through Culture (CTC) Grants support artistic collaboration between the UK and select countries in Asia, Europe and Australasia.

The grants support collaborative projects between artists, creative practitioners and arts organisations (including Film), fostering cross-cultural exchange and lasting relationships.

In 2024, the programme awarded over £741,000 across 11 countries in the Asia Pacific region, supporting 84 collaborations. The projects explored a wide range of themes, including diversity and inclusion and climate action.

Applications for the latest round of grants are now open. We expect to award approximately 90 grants of up to £5,000 or £10,000 to support new collaborative projects between the UK and the following countries:

Australia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, mainland China, Georgia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, New Zealand, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

We particularly encourage applications that engage with the themes of diversity and inclusion or climate change.

For guidelines, FAQ's and to make an application, visit Connections Through Culture 2025.

Looking for inspiration? Read about some of the projects underway from Connections through Culture 2024 that involve Film or Immersive organisations, artists or work:

Bali-Glasgow Filmmaker and Programme Exchange

UK: Glasgow Short Film Festival

Indonesia: Yayasan Kino Media (Minikino)

Through short films and filmmaker residencies, workshops, and festivals, Minikino and GSFF hope to open a creative dialogue in Scotland and Indonesia around environmental sustainability, social change, and empowerment. This collaboration will seek to find common ground on each organisation’s community challenges in driving social change, facilitating greater inclusion, and developing plans for longer-term partnerships.

Destination Earth

UK: Cellule Studio Ltd

New Zealand: Victoria University of Wellington

Destination Earth is a real-time immersive experience, enabling audiences to experience the connections that tie the atmosphere, human motions and ocean together. The artwork uses interactive visuals and a responsive soundscape to invite audiences to dive into the complex dance of flows across oceans, ice cycles, and atmosphere.

Post-Production Support Programme

UK: Grammar Productions

Myanmar: Akhat Alat Film Initiative

This programme will support film projects from young filmmakers who are preparing for post-production. It aims to build greater collaboration between filmmakers and film professionals from the UK and Myanmar.

Echoes of Deaf History: Deaffest Short Film Screening and Criticism Seminar

UK: Deaffest

China: Garrison Gou, Alice Hu

Deaf films reflect the history of the Deaf community and promote accessibility, yet they often lack effective academic attention. Our project aims to re-screen several historically significant short films from Deaffest with sign languages and hold corresponding film criticism seminars. Our goal is to establish a new discourse system in the field of film criticism—Deaf cultural criticism—to help the public understand and discern genuine Deaf films.

The Net

UK: Lorna Nickson Brown (Copper Thread Productions)

Philippines: Anjeline de Dios

The Net is a narrative film R&D project that intimately explores the inner life of a Filipino fisherman in the context of environmental degradation and the use of destructive fishing methods. The Net will provide a personal and sensory perspective, uniquely led by music and sound, including live scoring creative exchanges in Makati, Manila, and Birmingham, UK.

Star Nhà Ease: Understanding the archive with community curatorial workshops and open source digital archive

UK: Tuyet Van Huynh

Vietnam: The Centre for Assistance and Development of Movie Talents (TPD)

Building on the success of its 2024 pilot, Star Nhà Ease will research Vietnamese cinema, music, and poetry from the 1990s to the 2020s through interviews and archive visits to Viet Nam. This includes workshops, panel discussions, and a five-week curatorial programme, culminating in hybrid showcases and an open-source digital archive launch.

Patterned Vegetation: On the Biodegradable Materiality of Experimental Films

UK: Karel Doing

Indonesia: Lab Laba-Laba

“Patterned Vegetation” is a collaboration by Lab Laba-Laba and Karel Doing that explores the challenges of analogue filmmaking and seeks an alternative approach to capture and narrate ecological shifts in the West Java rainforest. This project will focus on a technique called Phytography. Refined by Karel Doing, phytography uses the internal chemistry of plants to make detailed images on photographic emulsion.

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