Deirdre Fishel is a social issue filmmaker whose work focuses on lives that have remained largely invisible.
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More than 1,000 film and television professionals—among them prominent documentarians Alex Gibney, Davis Guggenheim, Laura Poitras, Liz Garbus, and Kirsten Johnson—have signed an open letter opposing the Warner Bros./Paramount merger. IDA was part of the coalition that organized the letter, and we stand in solidarity with this coalition. IDA has opposed the consolidation of Warner Bros. Discovery since October 2025, when the first acquisition proposals emerged. Our opposition has deepened as the deals have evolved. In our March 3 statement , we named what is now at stake: not only the loss of
IDA, in solidarity with our partners at the International Coalition for Filmmakers at Risk (ICFR), calls on the Turkish authorities to drop the accusations against filmmaker and festival organizer Rojhilat Aksoy, amid a growing crackdown on Kurdish and Armenian films and filmmakers.
Jerald B. Harkness is the President and CEO of Studio Auteur, LLC, a content creation company specializing in producing broadcast documentaries.
The Hellenic Documentary Association (Hellas Docs) has asked IDA to add our voice to their "Culture Absent" initiative, and we are glad to do so. This week, IDA joined European documentary organizations at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival to build stronger, more coordinated support for filmmakers around the world. The need for public investment in documentary — from broadcaster funding to institutional support — was a part of those conversations. Public media exists to serve the public. Documentary filmmaking is central to how societies document themselves, preserve collective memory, and
IDA announced that Jonathan Gray, attorney and producer, Susan Margolin, producer and a pioneer of digital distribution, Jennifer Tiexiera, filmmaker and co-founder of co-founders of Lady & Bird, and Katie Townsend, litigator and previous Deputy Executive Director & Legal Director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, have joined its board.
The following Glossary and Key Takeaways, organized as answers to 5 specific questions, were collected from the February 5 IDAinsight titled “Beyond the Distributor: Theatrical Exhibition for Independently-Released Films.”
Acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery jeopardizes the future of documentary filmmaking.
Late last year, IDA gathered documentary field leaders and friends, along with our Impact Circle community, at a private home in New York City for an intimate conversation about the state of our field. Raoul Peck spoke. You very likely know his work — including I Am Not Your Negro , which drew from James Baldwin’s writings to make one of the most compelling accounts of race and power in documentary, and most recently Orwell: 2+2=5 , an investigation, via George Orwell, into how authoritarianism corrodes language and reality itself. I’d had the chance to interview Raoul and producer Alex Gibney
Welcome to IDA Member Spotlight, a monthly interview series highlighting IDA members and showcasing the depth and diversity of our community. This month, we had the pleasure of speaking with Yael Melamede and Hilla Medalia. Hilla Medalia is an Academy Award-nominated and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker, producer, and writer whose work has been celebrated worldwide for its emotional depth, cultural insight, and narrative boldness. She has received six Emmy nominations for her films, and her projects have screened internationally in theaters and on major platforms, including HBO, MTV