From 2018 to 2025, The Uncertain Kingdom supported British cinema by funding filmmakers whose stories tell us about ourselves.
The Uncertain Kingdom began with the idea for a short film anthology. The project brought together twenty emerging and established directors working across film, TV, theatre, animation, dance and radio to create a ground-breaking anthology that offers a unique portrait of the nation at the end of a tumultuous decade. Those twenty films were released in summer 2020 to critical acclaim. The Covid-19 pandemic prompted the commissioning of a twenty-first film on that topic, which was released in the autumn of 2020.
Inspired by the community of filmmakers that arose from the anthology project and the enthusiasm for films that grappled with Britishness, founders John Jencks, Isabel Freer and Georgia Goggin reimagined The Uncertain Kingdom as a feature film development fund. The fund ran from 2022 - 2025 and supported thirteen documentary and fiction feature films across six funding rounds.
In 2024, The Uncertain Kingdom backed a further twenty short films. The Belief Shorts responded to the continuing uncertainty of the times with three explorations of ‘belief’, while the Belief Grant supported seventeen filmmaking teams whose talent and vision The Uncertain Kingdom team believed in.
Across all its projects, The Uncertain Kingdom supported more than 50 films and over 130 writers, directors and producers.