HOME | The Mother Tongues Award | Ardimages UK, Shudder Films

The Mother Tongues Award is a development initiative launched by production companies Ardimages UK and Shudder Films in association with sales agent Charades, UK distributor Curzon and creative agency Intermission. We are looking for feature film projects at treatment or script stage, written by UK-based filmmakers, set mainly in the UK, in which the story dialogue is in a language other than English.

The UK is one of the most diverse and multicultural countries in the world, with more than 300 different languages spoken by UK residents, and one in seven (9.3 million people) born in other countries. The UK also has 14 indigenous languages: 5 Celtic, 3 Germanic, 3 Romance, and 3 sign languages. We want to dig deeper to develop feature films that are written, produced and directed by UK residents, telling stories that take place in cultural communities existing within the UK that speak another language than English.

We strongly believe that culturally-specific stories are not only appealing to a niche audience, but on the contrary are universal, and that further representation is needed on screen in order to truly reflect the reality of Britain today.