BY Kristal Sotomayor & Eddie Hustleby

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Well, the juries and the people have spoken. The 38th edition of the IDA Documentary Awards is now part of IDA lore, but you, as IDA Members, can still check out the Member Voting Portal through December 17 at 11:59 p.m. PT to watch the nominees and winners in the Features and Shorts categories, including multi winners All That Breathes (Best Director—Shaunak Sen; Best Editing—Charlotte Munch Bengtsen, Vedant Joshi; Pare Lorentz Award) and Fire of Love (Best Cinematography

A Letter From Hajnal Molnar-Szakacs, Director of Artist Accelerator Program at Sundance Institute Nonfiction storytellers and their work have been deeply impacted by recent world events, public health crises, and overdue reckonings. The impact on the field has been far-reaching and complex. This has manifested in various ways including the ongoing need to address sustainability, safety, and security, as well as a desire for holistic culture change to make the field more inclusive, accessible, and grounded in values-based ethics-first filmmaking practice. Six years ago, Sundance Institute and

By KRISTAL SOTOMAYOR and EDDIE HustlebyThe 2022 IDA Documentary Awards Call For Entries (CFE) launches on Thursday, May 26! The IDA Documentary Awards are a crucial event in our field. Nominations can elevate a documentarian’s career and their project’s global impact. Last year’s nominees have gone on to win many accolades: Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature; Suave won the Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting; and nine IDA Documentary Awards nominees received Peabody Award nominations.In this post, the people

In the crowded documentary field, short documentaries don’t always get the love they deserve. Our friends at Argo understand this well and have built a whole platform that celebrates and streams short films. We are excited to partner with Argo to highlight their latest playlist A Sense of Place, which includes four documentary shorts that were nominated for IDA Documentary Awards in previous years. IDA Members with a Doc Maker membership or higher get three months of complimentary exclusive access to Argo. To learn how to access your Argo benefit, visit here. Not an IDA Member? You can visit

Completing and promoting a film under "normal" circumstances is difficult enough, but imagine the impossibility of pulling this off in the midst of a pandemic! That’s exactly what our IDA Documentary Screening Series grantees managed to do. This year, IDA supported 11 filmmakers from historically underrepresented communities through its in-kind grants, in an effort to help minimize the financial costs associated with pursuing a film awards campaign, and support a more equitable documentary culture. Here is a short conversation with some of our 2020-2021 grantees. What was the most challenging

It is no secret that documentary filmmaking has a complicated legacy when it comes to supporting the survivors of gender-based violence. Even with the best intentions, many filmmakers fall into dangerous extractive patterns and use practices that end up doing more harm than good for a participant. Last week, IDA and the Documentary Accountability Working Group hosted a panel discussion on how filmmakers and journalists can ethically tell these important stories without harming survivors. Here are six key takeaways from the discussion, as well as suggestions and resources for a trauma-informed

When the IDA Documentary Screening Series launched eight years ago in place of its annual DocuWeeks™ theatrical showcase, the goal was to present the most critically acclaimed documentaries of the year to awards voters and IDA members in both Los Angeles and New York City. While the purpose and goal of the Screening Series has not changed since its inception, the program has grown dramatically over the years. We went from screening 15 films in 2014 to nearly 50 films over four months in 2019. This enormous industry growth has led to an increasingly expensive and complex awards campaign model

The David L. Wolper Student Documentary Award, introduced to the IDA Documentary Awards in 1987, recognizes exceptional achievement in nonfiction film and video production at the university level. Bringing greater industry and public awareness to the work of students in the documentary field is an integral part of the IDA Documentary Awards, and we are thrilled to engage with these emerging storytellers in the field. Each of the 2020 IDA Documentary Awards nominees for the Student Documentary Award are transitioning between their educational institutions into the "real world" of documentary

This year’s virtual gathering of Getting Real ‘20 called for the redistribution of power within documentary practice and the removal of barriers inhibiting the expansion of possibility within the field and access to it. However, the process of actualizing such changes requires a series of transitions that move us away from the status quo to the future. Although many conversations held before, during and after the convening are grounded in that work, one in particular, “The Liberatory Canon,” illustrates a pattern of change taking place in the ecosystem that reflects current values within the