Career Achievement Award

Patricio Guzmán

Truth to Power

Amy Goodman & Juan González

Amy Goodman is an award-winning investigative journalist, author, and host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, which airs on more than 1,500 public television and radio stations worldwide. Goodman is a recipient of the George Polk Award, Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award, the Society for Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for Excellence, American Women in Radio and Television Gracie Award, the Paley Center for Media’s She’s Made It Award, and the Overseas Press Club Award The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard honored Goodman with the 2014 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence Lifetime Achievement Award. She is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize' for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.” She is also the first co-recipient of the Park Center for Independent Media’s Izzy Award, named for the legendary journalist I.F. Stone, and was later inducted into the Center’s I.F. Stone Hall of Fame.  Goodman was awarded the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship and has received awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Project Censored. Goodman received the first-ever Communication for Peace Award from the World Association for Christian Communication. She was also honored by the National Council of Teachers of English with the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language and received the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Reporting. Goodman is the author of six New York Times bestsellers: “Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America,” co-written with David Goodman and Denis Moynihan (2016); “The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope” (2012);  “Breaking the Sound Barrier” (with a preface by Bill Moyers), (2009); “Standing up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times” co-written with David Goodman (2008); “Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People who Fight Back” co-written with David Goodman (2006); and “The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them” co-written with David Goodman (2004). 

Juan González was a staff columnist for New York’s Daily News from 1987 to 2016 and has been a co-host since 1996 of Democracy Now! His investigative reports on urban policy, race relations, the labor movement, and Latin America have garnered numerous accolades, including two George Polk Awards for commentary, and in 2015, he became the first Latino to be inducted into the Society of Professional Journalists New York Journalism Hall of Fame. González has also authored five books, including two acclaimed histories: "Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America" and "News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media" (co-authored with Joseph Torres), which was a New York Times best-seller and a finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Award. González was one of the original founders of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in 1984 and served as the group’s president from 2002 to 2004. During that time, he spearheaded a nationwide effort by professional journalists to successfully challenge the Federal Communications Commission’s dismantling of media ownership regulations. Before he entered journalism, González was a key figure in the Columbia University student revolt of 1968, and later a leader of the militant Puerto Rican group the Young Lords, and of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights. Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, he was raised in East Harlem and Brooklyn, New York. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia, has been a visiting professor at Brooklyn College and New York University, and was the Richard D. Heffner Professor of Communications and Public Policy at Rutgers University from 2017 to 2023 and is currently a Senior Fellow at the Great Cities Institute of the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Emerging Filmmaker Award

Maia Lekow & Christopher King

IDA’s Emerging Filmmaker Award has been given annually since 2003 to a filmmaker who, by virtue of their early work, shows extraordinary promise in exploring the possibilities of the nonfiction art form. The recipient is selected by IDA’s Board of Directors and typically presented to a filmmaker with a notable recent first or second feature film. Previous recipients include Shiori Ito, Nanfu Wang, Alex Rivera, and Natalia Almada.

Maia Lekow and Christopher King are an award-winning Kenyan-Australian husband-and-wife filmmaking team and the co-founders of Nairobi-based Circle & Square Productions. For over fifteen years they have collaborated on cinematic documentaries that combine intimate character-driven storytelling with visually immersive filmmaking, exploring themes of identity, history, culture, memory, and social change across East Africa.

Their debut feature documentary, The Letter (2019), premiered to international acclaim and was selected as Kenya's official submission to the 93rd Academy Awards. Their second feature, How to Build a Library, premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. The film has since received widespread international recognition, winning the Golden Alexander (Dimitri Eipides) Award for Newcomers at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival, the Special Jury Award for Documentary Feature at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Amnesty International Award at the Human Rights Film Festival Lugano, the Main Award in the Documentary Competition at Festival International Signes de Nuit, Best Documentary at Jackson Wild Doc Fest, and a Special Mention at the El Gouna Film Festival. It has also been an Official Selection at IDFA, Sheffield DocFest, Sydney Film Festival, and True/False Film Festival, among many others. Their films have screened at many of the world's leading festivals, universities and cultural institutions, earning recognition for their nuanced, deeply human storytelling and their ability to illuminate complex social and historical questions through intimate personal narratives. They are currently in post-production on their third feature documentary, set against the backdrop of the Kenyan coast set for release in 2027.

Amicus Award

Cannes Docs: Pierre-Alexis Chevit, Raphaellë Cittanova,

Cassandra Bazin, Babette Dieu

Established in 1993, IDA's Amicus Award is presented to acknowledge non-filmmaking friends of the documentary community who have contributed significantly to our industry.

As part of the unique Marché du Film - Festival de Cannes environment, Cannes Docs is a comprehensive industry program and networking platform for documentary filmmakers and film professionals working with creative, cinematic, author-driven feature docs -- in particular, specialized sales agents, top festival programmers, key experts from the global doc scene, and powerfully committed non-fiction advocates.

The program offers multiple documentary-focused opportunities to actively engage and collaborate, through one-to-one consultations, speed meetings, panel conversations, masterclasses, docs-in-progress showcases, pitching sessions, social events... and more. Simultaneously, on a deeper level, Cannes Docs works at tirelessly reaffirming the fundamental esthetic and political role of the documentary genre, doing so at the very heart of the world’s most influential film festival and market.

Headed by Pierre-Alexis Chevit since 2015, Cannes Docs operates under the leadership of Marché du Film’s Executive Director Guillaume Esmiol, and is organized by the extraordinarily dedicated core team members Babette Dieu, Raphaëlle Cittanova, and Cassandra Bazin.