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Sponsored Projects

Since 1998, IDA's fiscal sponsorship program has been helping independent documentary projects of all types get funded, finished and seen.


Film Status

"He was a little man who made coffee and played the harmonica - and that was enough!" Bill Sackter's life didn't start out extraordinary.

At some point in almost everyone’s life, there comes a challenge so overwhelming, so painful, that it forces a course of action – to run and hide or to turn and head bravely Into the Storm.

Billy Dean Anderson was a prolific outsider artist and criminal who escaped prison multiple times.

The New Normal is a documentary that examines the relationship between climate change and mental health.

How do you know a community of immigrants has finally established itself in its new home? They build a place of worship, often one that looks like those they left behind.

A SALUTE TO BLACK HOLLYWOOD will assemble African American Academy Award nominees and winners for a generational group portrait.

In South Los Angeles, in one of the most notoriously underserved communities in the country, an unconventional yet overachieving charter school is working with locals to change the narrative for it

To right the wrongs of his all-American sex education, a 36-year-old Alex Liu goes on a quest to uncover naked truths and hard facts - no matter how awkward it gets.

When Hilde Back sponsored a young, impoverished Kenyan student, she thought nothing of it. She paid roughly $15 dollars per term to keep him in primary school.

A TOTAL DISRUPTION is an interactive video portal for innovators and entrepreneurs, documenting the thought leaders and doers who are driving the greatest revolution in the history of mankind with

In a tough economy, everyone worries about their job, their home and their children's futures.

"History is biography writ large." The same is true of health care.

Two mothers fight for justice and accountability when their daughters are found dead in a California women's prison.

The Boys of the Lough, the first Celtic folk band to travel the U.S., heads out on their 68th cross-country tour of America.

Driven, Gerry Adams whether he likes it or not is an icon who represents the history of the war in Ireland as he does the peace.

Everybody Flies

Pursuing the best care for her son, a single mom relocates her three boys to a hotel room two thousand miles from home; a Texas family receives the same devastating diagnosis for their active 5-yea

A rich, heartbreaking, first-ever documentary re-telling of the Ambassador, the most legendary hotel in American history, and one of the greatest failures of the historic preservation movement.

Ageless Art is a visionary project spotlighting creative arts programs for people with Alzheimer's.

AI WEIWEI’S TURANDOT follows Chinese revolutionary artist, Ai Weiwei, as he brings his artistic vision and iconoclastic activism to Puccini’s Turandot at the Rome Opera House during his directorial operatic debut.

Aiko Ohno leaves her fast-paced life in Tokyo as a food photographer for Japan’s rural coastline, fueled by a desire to help save the last generation of female abalone free divers, known as the ama

Ain’t I a Woman traces the history of the Equal Rights Amendment to illustrate how across race, class, and gender, the desire to access white male power has undermined the most obvious piece of soc

Horticulturalist Alan Chadwick was the leading educator and innovator of a movement that combines French Intensive and Biodynamic gardening.

A young man in the Haitian city of Saint-Marc considers his options for the future: should he stay in the community where he grew up, or should he join the exodus abroad in search of other opportun

Alegria is a coming-of-age story about my dad, Michael Lopez-Alegria, an astronaut leading the first all-commercial mission to the International Space Station.

In 1909, Alice Huyler Ramsey became the first woman to attempt a cross-country drive.

Advances in science and technology in America depend heavily on high-skilled legal immigrants from across the globe.

ALL WE'VE LOST is a feature length documentary film focusing on the human experience within the case of Barry Beach and the movement for criminal justice reform in Montana.

All’s Well and Fair gives a unique perspective on growth and identity, choice and consequence, through portraying three punk rock mothers and their five children.

Amá tells an important and untold story - the abuses committed against Native American women by the American state in the middle of the twentieth century: separated from their families and sent to

Adolescence in the time of post-revolution Egypt that’s shifting around an angry teenager who’s’ turning from an infant into a young woman during an extraordinary context of upheaval and violence.

Dark secrets of poisoned waters in the remote Peruvian Amazon are revealed in this documentary political thriller when indigenous communities take on Big Oil in California Federal Court.

“Every day we walk on top of thousands of years of history. The natural wonders in the landscape and the sidewalks of our cities hold the secrets of America’s past.

Whether we like it or not, most of us now live within diverse, globalized societies. Cultural homogeny is becoming extinct.

As the nation experiences the deadliest era of massacres we’ve ever seen, the mystery surrounding them looms larger than ever. How does the US compare to the rest of the world?

American Love Story: A Community in Search of Freedom is a hybrid documentary-narrative that has been shot over the course of six years.