Today, BAVC Media announces the 2025 cohort of its longstanding MediaMaker Fellowship, which is known for betting on emerging artists and early projects as a “first-in” supporter. Selected filmmakers will receive US$10,000 in unrestricted funding, mentorship, industry access, feedback sessions, and workshops over the next 9 months. The Fellowship kicks off with an in-person intensive convening in San Francisco in April before continuing at select film festivals across the U.S.
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Over the past several years, when discussing the audience exodus to large platform streamers, I’ve encountered exhaustion from filmmakers, arts workers, funders, broadcasters, distributors, and exhibitors. Everyone wants to help fix the problem, but no one knows where to start. That’s because there are real issues that stack the deck against documentary filmmakers and our audiences. They can be classified into three main categories: funding, discoverability, and unequal market power.
This month, we have the great opportunity to highlight three rising stars and Northwestern University Documentary Media program graduate students: Blake Knecht, Gríma Eir Geirs Irmudóttir, and Shawn Antoine II. The Northwestern University Documentary Media Program is a member of IDA’s educational membership program , an essential program for higher education institutions that want to provide their students, faculty, and staff with access to the documentary industry. If you are interested in joining our educational membership program, please reach out to Anisa Hosseinnezhad, IDA Membership
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.
Sora, a new generative AI video tool from Open AI, is named after the Japanese word for sky. Is the sky the limit? Last year, the company gave early access to 300 artists, some of whom later denounced the company’s product release as artwashing. OpenAI responded with a series of exclusive promotional screenings of artist-made films for industry executives in New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo. What might this all mean for the documentary field? We decided to run our own experiment. To test the limits of Sora, we prompted it with the taglines from the six most recent Oscar-winning documentaries. We showed the resulting 15-second silent clips to a panel of seven documentary luminaries over Zoom.
The 23rd edition of CPH:DOX wrapped last month, with record-breaking attendance and satisfied delegates at the festival’s market, but individual events at the industry conference revealed ruptures in the front of documentary unity against political threats. Filmmaker Omar Shargawi issued one of the most visible criticisms, reading a statement contrasting the festival’s support of Ukrainian filmmakers to a lack of “solidarity with the Palestinians” at an industry talk. At the closing ceremony, Artistic Director Niklas Engstrøm and Executive Director Katrine Kilgaard said their aim was “pluralism” and “to make room for a multitude of opinions and ideas, including those that challenge our own perspective as a festival.” Documentary reached out to Engstrøm for further comment via email after the festival ended.
When it comes to AI and documentary, all bets are off in 2025. So, we scrapped our column line-up for The Synthesis and hit reset. To recap, it’s been a dizzying year so far: in Europe, the February Paris AI Policy Action summit failed to usher in much meaningful regulation, and in the U.S., under the new Presidential administration, a March directive from the National Institute of Standards and Technology eliminates the mention of “AI safety” and “AI fairness.” To reboot in this context, we checked in with a few documentarians, artists, and human rights advocates. We asked them this question: In this unregulated and dysregulated landscape, what are the immediate and new concerns of AI shaping the future of documentary filmmaking in 2025?
One of the foremost critical thinkers of the international documentary ecosystem, Leonard Cortana was tapped by EURODOC program head Nora Philippe in 2023 to manage the inclusion program and strategic partnerships. The resulting program, BIPOC EURODOC, hosts bi-monthly member meetings and monthly public webinars with outside experts to support the ongoing education of its members. The task force also conducts focus groups to inform white papers like this recent study on film festival delegations, in partnership with the #Docsafe initiative. Speaking on Zoom from Mexico City, Cortana spoke with Documentary about the goals of BIPOC EURODOC, the politics of film festival delegations, and why post-screening Q&As are “an extremely unsafe space.”
Documentary is happy to debut the trailer for Peter McDowell’s first feature, Jimmy in Saigon (2024) . The film premiered last year at BFI Flare before a robust festival run, especially at LGBTQ film festivals. It will open at the Cinema Village NY on April 25 and at Laemmle theaters in LA starting May 8, before a VOD release on May 13 through distributor Dark Star Pictures. Pic is produced by McDowell, Lucia Palmarini, and Peter Schulman. Executive producers include Dan Savage. Jimmy in Saigon begins as a personal exploration into the mysterious death and radical life of Jimmy McDowell, an
Congratulations to the five IDA grantees who have premieres at Hot Docs 2025.