The Film Centre of Montenegro is the country's national institution for film funding, development and promotion. Every year FCCG opens a series of public grant calls — feature films, debut features, documentaries, animated films, shorts, films in production, and minority co-productions — where domestic and international production companies apply for co-financing.
Before this project, the entire process lived inside email threads and downloaded PDFs. Applicants received category-specific forms, filled them in manually, and sent submissions back as attachments — along with director's explications, producer's explications, budgets, financing plans, treatments, and supporting documents. The FCCG team then triaged dozens of inboxes, renamed files, built spreadsheets, and chased confirmations by hand every call cycle.
There was no submission record beyond an inbox, no audit trail of who reviewed what, no status visibility for applicants, and no structured way to filter, archive, or report on the data. For an institution handling sensitive government-level decisions, this wasn't just inefficient — it was a liability.
We built a custom Laravel 11 application hosted independently on a dedicated subdomain — fully decoupled from FCCG's institutional site. Every decision in the architecture was driven by three requirements: structured data, provable security, and zero operational drag on the FCCG team once live.
The portal ships with a full security audit trail — every authentication event and every sensitive admin action is logged with timestamp, IP address, and user-agent context. Failed logins, account approvals and rejections, application status changes — all queryable from inside the Filament panel. Combined with email-based OTP two-factor authentication, rate-limited auth endpoints, enforced session timeouts, secure cookie flags, and a tightened header stack (HSTS, X-Frame-Options, Content-Security-Policy, Referrer-Policy, X-Content-Type-Options), the portal closes the most common attack surfaces on a public-facing system of this kind — and gives FCCG a defensible, auditable record of every decision made inside it.
Laravel 11 was the clear choice — a mature, battle-tested PHP framework with a strong security model, excellent file handling, and first-class support for role-based access. Filament v3 provides the admin panel out of the box with the flexibility to extend it into the exact workflow FCCG's team needed, without building a bespoke UI from scratch. The portal lives on a dedicated subdomain, fully isolated from FCCG's institutional site, with Cloudflare in front of it for DNS, DDoS protection, and an additional security layer.
Every application now has a database row, a defined lifecycle, and a permanent record. The security exposure of sensitive applicant material — budgets, scripts, legal documents — has been moved from standard email inboxes into a properly access-controlled system. The FCCG team no longer triages attachments or chases confirmations.
"I can't believe everything was completed in record time. Revisions were minimal, all testing was finished incredibly quickly, and the portal was live for our users in the shortest timeframe we could have hoped for. We are never changing Studio Piksel. This was a genuinely positive experience — for us and for our applicants."
If you're managing applications, calls, or any structured intake process through email and spreadsheets — there's a cleaner system underneath waiting to be built. Custom. Secure. Yours.