Congratulations to the numerous IDA members who have premieres and presentations at Tribeca and DC/DOX 2026.
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International Documentary Association (IDA) announces the initial program for Getting Real ’26, its biennial convening for documentary practitioners, held in-person in Los Angeles and virtually from July 20–23, 2026. The industry’s current terms are no longer working. It’s time to collectively rewrite them. Getting Real ’26 will examine what documentary owes its makers, its subjects, and the public it exists to serve, with discussions on generative AI, the economics of survival in an underfunded field, new cooperative and distribution models, rising censorship, the defense of public media, and
Academy Award–nominated filmmaker Tia Lessin is the director and producer, with Carl Deal, of Steal This Story, Please! They made the Hurricane Katrina survival story Trouble the Water, winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and the Gotham Film Award; their Oscar-shortlisted film Citizen Koch explored the extremist takeover of the Republican Party in the Midwest. Tia received three Emmy Awards and the duPont-Columbia silver baton for her work directing The Janes ( with Emma Pildes) , a film about the underground network of abortion providers in 1960s Chicago. Tia’s work has premiered at major
International Documentary Association (IDA) has appointed Rachel Denny as Deputy Executive Director, effective May 11, 2026. The newly created position oversees external affairs and financial strategy, reporting directly to Executive Director Dominic Asmall Willsdon. Based in New York, Denny will also lead IDA's activities on the East Coast, where more than a quarter of its members are based. Denny brings two decades of experience as a media, film, and nonprofit executive, with leadership roles at the Sundance Institute, Film at Lincoln Center, and United States Artists. She has served as an
Updated on June 8, 2026–Safety Planning Training for Documentarians June 8, 2026 Censorship is not always overt. In fact, many democracies that openly espouse values of freedom of speech and expression often engage in more covert forms of censorship and suppression. Of late, this is what the world of independent nonfiction filmmaking has been experiencing. A film might quietly lose its funder for unspoken reasons. Individual funders are quietly pulling their names off credits for films exploring strong political themes. Streamers are either sunsetting their documentary arms or primarily
Deirdre Fishel is a social issue filmmaker whose work focuses on lives that have remained largely invisible.
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