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A Fresh 2025 Introduction to Documentary Budgeting and Scheduling (With New Templates!)

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This article fully updates the older Documentary articles “A (Revised!) Introduction to Documentary Budgeting”(2019) and “Don’t Fudge on Your Budget”(2008). ...

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IDA Documentary Awards 2024 Winners and Nominees

2025 IDA Grants Cycle Updates
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IDA Announced 2024 Open Call Grant Recipients Receiving a Total of $525,000

Enhancing Accessibility and Support for Disabled Nonfiction Media Makers - NAI 2024 Report

Documentary Grants & Fellowship Directory

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Meet Logan Elevate 2024 Grantees!

Logan Elevate Grant provides $30,000 each to three emerging women and non-binary filmmakers of color directing feature-length journalistic documentary films.

IDA and DWU/CWA Local 9003 ratifies initial two-year contract

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What Filmmakers Should Know About Privacy and Copyright From BAVC Media’s Upcoming Landmark Study on Magnetic Media

Access to archival media is often the result of the invisible work of teams of archivists and technicians who preserve content on fragile media and provide it to the public. Accessing archival media can be a financial challenge for documentary filmmakers because preservation of media is as time consuming and expensive (sometimes more) as shooting new footage. Logistically, making this material available is time consuming, expensive, and requires skilled team members to coordinate. Our upcoming research study, Mapping the Magnetic Media Landscape, a project of BAVC Media, examines U.S. collection holders’ needs and how we might support them. Because of our decades of work with and for filmmakers, we can put it bluntly: All of these costs are ultimately passed on to the filmmaker.

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The Synthesis: Here’s What Happened When We Prompted Sora With Taglines From Oscar-Winning Documentaries

shirin anlen

Online Feature

“Our Commitment Is to the Space Where Difficult Conversations Can Happen, Not to Issuing Verdicts”: Interview With CPH:DOX Artistic Director Niklas Engstrøm

Vladan Petković

Online Feature

Berwick 2025: Round Here

Cici Peng

Exclusive News

BAVC Media Announces Six 2025 MediaMaker Fellows

IDA Editorial Staff

Feature

Could Policy Be the Answer?

Abby Sun

Blog

Member Spotlight: Blake Knecht, Gríma Eir Geirs Irmudóttir, and Shawn Antoine II

Anisa Hosseinnezhad

Spring 2025

Johan Grimonprez, a filmmaker known for spending years and years researching projects and making wondrous use of archival material, graces the cover on the worldwide release of his latest, Soundtrack to a Coup d’État. The cover feature is an extended conversation between Grimonprez and film writer Öykü Sofuoğlu. In a special dossier, four articles in this issue address how policy could help documentary filmmakers—and address just the smallest bit of all of the possibilities. Articles featured in the print version will be published online between March–June 2025.  
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Doc of the Week

The Adoptees

Vietnamese adoptee Mike Frailey searches for the truth behind the life and death of his childhood best friend 50 years after they were evacuated from their home country together as part of Operation Babylift. Co-directed by Mike himself, THE ADOPTEES is an epic, personal odyssey spanning continents and decades.