Little Badman adaptation wins support from expanded UK Global Screen Fund
Penguin Random House’s Little Badman book series
The animated adaptation of the Penguin Random House book series Little Badman is one of two children’s projects to have received £250,000 (US$331,000) each from the recently supersized UK Global Screen Fund.
A coproduction with Malaysia, Little Badman is made by UK producers Eugenio Perez, Dhanny Joshi and Thomas Stogdon for Big Deal Films, in collaboration with Walid Omar’s Malaysian studio Lil Critter Workshop.
Written by comedian, writer and YouTuber Humza Arshad and Henry White, it is aimed at 8-12s and follows an 11-year-old boy who is convinced he is destined to become the world’s greatest rap superstar.
Whatever You Do… Don’t Laugh!, meanwhile, is made by UK producer King Banana TV (Lotte Elwell, Katie Simmons and Chris Allen), who are collaborating with minority coproducer Sinking Ship Entertainment (Carla de Jong, Matt Bishop and Blair Powers) in Canada.
The animated TV series is aimed at three- to five-year-olds and sees a serious, bumptious presenter try to teach a simple lesson. However, everything always goes wrong, with hilarity ensuing.
The projects are two of seven to have received the £1.2m in funding as part of the most recent International Co-production funding round. The five other projects are feature films, including two documentaries.
In Search of The Lost World, a UK minority official coproduction with Brazil, is based on the Amazonian journey at the heart of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 classic novel The Lost World. It received £75,000 and is directed by Jorge Bodanzky alongside co-director and filmmaker Morzaniel Iramari, a member of the Yanomami indigenous group.
The UK producer is Scottish company Hopscotch Films (John Archer), in association with Kent-based Forbidden Cities (Daniella Rice, Fernando Mitjáns), while the Brazilian producer is Buriti Filmes (Laís Bodanzky, Luiz Bolognesi), in association with VideoFilmes (Walter Salles).
The other doc is The Mammoths That Escaped the Kingdom of Erlik Khan, a UK minority copro led by Denmark with North Macedonia and Portugal. The UK producer is Anna Hashmi, with line producer Kate Bullions for The Corner Shop Productions, collaborating with Denmark’s Real Lava (Sigrid Dyekjær and Harry Vaughn), Portugal’s Alecrim Vagabundo (Enrico Saraiva) and North Macedonia’s Ciconia Film (Tamara Kotevska and Jean Dakar).
The documentary feature film follows a young Dolgan reindeer herder in the Yakut Tundra, deciding whether to follow in his father’s ancestral footsteps or join the modern mammoth tusk hunters. It is directed by Oscar-nominated director Tamara Kotevska and received £103,203.
The British Film Institute (BFI), which administers the UK Global Screen Fund on behalf of the government, saw the fund’s budget almost triple, from £7m per year to £18.1m between 2026 and 2029, as part of the government’s Screen Growth Package.
Denitsa Yordanova, director of the UK Global Screen Fund, welcomed the funding boost at an event held during the BFI London Film Festival on October 9, when the latest awards were announced.
Yordanova, who joined the BFI in 2021 from All3Media to lead the fund, gave credit to the UK government’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
“Without their allyship and support and championing of this fund we wouldn’t have existed in 2021, and we wouldn’t have been successfully extended. Most importantly, the biggest gift they gave us at the end of last year was helping us successfully secure a massive budget expansion. This type of good news doesn’t happen very often in our sector, so we’re so phenomenally grateful to all the work that they do,” said Yordanova.
With the fund’s budget significantly boosted, a BFI International Town Hall meeting will take place online on October 14, with registration to attend the webinar available here.
The meeting will cover the latest from the UK Global Screen Fund, including recent awards and activity, plus a look at what comes next across each of its newly expanded strands.
The UK Global Screen Fund was launched in 2021 as a partial replacement for the European Union’s Creative Europe Media funding following Brexit.
International TV coproductions it has helped bring to screen include The Coop Troop, Badjelly, Piripenguins, Mojo Swoptops, Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster, Survival of the Slowest, Luna in Dreamland, Captain Onion’s Buoyant Academy for Wayward Youth and MaeBee.
