As first reported in The New York Times, documentary filmmakers Natalia Almada and Laura Poitras were among 23 recipients of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship Grants for 2012—the so-called "Genius Grants," which have no application processes, arduous reporting requirements, or strings attached of any sort. The fellowships are $500,000, paid out over five years.

According to its website, the MacArthur Fellows Program, administered by the John  D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, honors "talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. The Fellowship is intended to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations."

Almada, who earned the 2009 IDA Jacqueline Donnet Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award among other honors, maintains residences in both Brooklyn and Mexico City, and her most recent works— Al Otro Lado, El General and El Velador—explore the dualities, nuances and grey areas between the two cultures, with a style that eschews documentary conventions for deeper, more lyrical and literary resonances beneath the surface of sociopolitical inquiry. For a video interview with Alamda on the MacArthur Fellows website, click here.

Poitras is currently working on the third installment of her trilogy about America in a post-9/11 world, the war on terror and its human consequences. The first film, My Country, My Country, earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature, while The Oath earned an IDA Humanitas Award and an IDA Award nomination in 2010 for Best Documentary Feature. The third installment addresses, according to an interview with Poitras on the MacArthur Fellows website, "the NSA, WikiLeaks, whistle blowers and how the war on terror comes home."

Other documentary filmmakers who have earned MacArthur Fellowships over the years include Edet Belzberg, Charles Burnett, Jon Else, James  Longley, Louis Massiah, Errol Morris, Stanley Nelson, Marcel Ophuls and Frederick Wiseman.

The IDA is thrilled to announce that A&E has signed on as a sponsor of the 28th annual IDA Documentary Awards at the Luminary level. A&E, a global media company with joint ventures and channels all over the world since 1984, is a proud provider of quality non-fiction television programming with a strong focus on arts and entertainment. We are happy to have an organization with such common interests pledge their support to our most important event of the year.

The following organizations and companies have also committed to supporting the upcoming Awards ceremony:

Gold Sponsor:
ABC News Video Source

Silver Sponsor:
Authentic Entertainment
Focus Forward
Stella Artois
The Standard Hollywood
American Film Showcase

Held at the end of every year, the IDA Documentary Awards is the foremost event dedicated to the art of documentary film. Winners of the 28th Annual IDA Documentary Awards will be announced on December 7, 2012 in Los Angeles. Learn more about the IDA Awards. 

NBCUniversal and Telemundo, ABC and Univision, Fox and Colombia’s RCN—all of these major networks recognize the opportunities in providing content to the growing U.S. Latino and Hispanic population and the importance of including second-generation viewers who want content in English and Spanish. The demand for content is as diverse as the viewership and includes the full spectrum of non-fiction programming, from news to lifestyle programming to documentary series.

As a documentary filmmaker, how can you leverage the opportunities available with this new demand for content? What stories are programmers seeking, and how does your doc fit into the picture? How can you incorporate these new outlets into your distribution plan?

On Monday, October 15, join Moises Velez, IDA Board Member and Peabody award-winning Director of Development & Current Programming for NBC Universal-owned cable network mun2, and a panel of content creators, programmers, and industry influencers for a discussion of the new programming outlets and how you can participate in the opportunities to be found. Panelists include Luis Ortiz, Managing Director at Latino Public Broadcasting and filmmaker Jennifer Maytorena Taylor (New Muslim Cool, Home Front).

Co-presenters with IDA of this event are the Latino Film Fund and NALIP.

Register for this Doc U today! IDA Members and Students receive special rates—see the previous link for more details.

The International Documentary Association invites you to cast your vote for the best documentary films of the year!

For the third year in a row, IDA members will decide the winners in the Best Feature category and in the Best Short category of the IDA Documentary Awards. Current IDA members who meet our judging requirements will be able to view the nominated films and cast their votes online from anywhere in the world!

Nominees will be announced October 24. You must register by November 1 to be eligible for consideration as a judge.

IDA members who agree to the official rules can register now to be an official judge. Not a member? Learn more about the perks of membership today!

TheWrap.com, NPR, and several other news outlets have announced that Syrian documentary filmmaker and festival director Orwa Nyrabia has been released from custody after it was announced he was missing from Damascus International Airport on August 23.

Below is the full report from NPR:

A Syrian documentary film producer whose disappearance two weeks ago prompted concerns for his safety and a letter of support from the Toronto International Film Festival is now free, according to reports.

The European Documentary Network website announced today that, "Finally the good news came, that Orwa Nyrabia, Syrian film producer and director of the Syrian film festival DOX BOX, who was arrested August 23 at Damascus International Airport, has been set free."

The site had no more details about Nyrabia or where he spent the more than two weeks since he disappeared at the airport. But it is widely believed that he was in the custody of Syria's intelligence services (emphasis from IDA). Nyrabia had been bound for Cairo; alarm over his disappearance spread after his wife, Diana El-Jeiroudi, was told that he never boarded his flight.

Last week, the Toronto International Film Festival expressed what it called "grave concern" for Nyrabia. A statement from the festival noted that "Nyrabia belongs to the emerging generation of Syrian filmmakers passionate about world cinema and passionate about freedom."

Celebrities such as Robert De Niro, Jeremy Irons, and Danny Boyle have called for Nyrabia's release, using both letters and a video. And today, actor Khalid Abdalla tweeted that he had been in touch with Nyrabia since his release: "Orwa is out. Confirmed. Spoke to him. He sounds beautiful, as always."

News of his release was welcomed by attendees at the Toronto festival. And it came days after the death of Syrian filmmaker Tamer al-Awam, who died in Aleppo, "where he was filming the bombardment of civilian neighborhoods," as The New York Times reported.

Nyrabia runs the DOX BOX festival, which brings international documentaries to Syria. The festival was essentially cancelled this spring, as organizers decided to send the films to other festivals around the world, in light of the violence that by then had taken hold in Syria.

Have you ever considered making the leap from film to radio docs? The Public Radio Exchange, PRX.org, is opening the door wide to new voices and styles of non-U.S. storytelling with the Global Story Project. It's a competitive open call for audio storytelling proposals from anyone: fresh reporting, reworking of archival or classic works, new approaches to production and, most importantly, a chance for new voices to be heard. "Time is short and [they] have about $50,000 to work with," so you better hurry! The deadline is fast approaching on Mon., Oct. 15th. 

https://prx.submittable.com/submit

Filmmaker Arnold Shapiro and the Sundance Institute's Documentary Film Program and Fund will both be honored at the upcoming 28th Annual IDA Documentary Awards on Friday, December 7, 2012 in Los Angeles. Now in its 28th year, the IDA Documentary Awards is the foremost event dedicated to the art of documentary film. While the winners for Best Feature, Short, Limited and Continuing Series, and others will not be announced until the event, we wanted to announce our honorees for both the Career Achievement and Pioneer Award a little ahead of time.

The IDA will award its prestigious 2012 Career Achievement Award to producer Arnold Shapiro. Arnold is the Oscar and Emmy Award-winning producer, director, writer of the documentary Scared Straight! Among his other 150 awards are 16 Emmys including the Governors’ Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, three Humanitas Prizes, The People's Choice Award, and the George Foster Peabody Award. Arnold has produced 33 series including CBS's Rescue 911 and Big Brother, and the current A&E hit series, Beyond Scared Straight; four CBS-TV movies, two prime time CBS drama specials, and more than 90 documentaries and specials. Arnold has produced documentary programs for CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, UPN, PBS and 14 cable networks from A&E to HBO.

The IDA Career Achievement Award is given to a filmmaker who has made a major impact on the documentary genre through a long and distinguished body of work. In previous years, IDA has bestowed its Career Achievement Award on documentary luminaries such as Barbara Kopple, Errol Morris, Michael Moore and Les Blank.

Today, the IDA also announced that the organization's Pioneer Award will be presented to Sundance Institute's groundbreaking Documentary Film Program and Fund (DFP). Established in 2002 with a gift from the Open Society Institute with leadership support from Ford Foundation's Just Films initiative (among others), the DFP is a leading creative and financial resource for contemporary-issue nonfiction filmmakers worldwide. Each year the DFP grants and awards $1-2 million to independent documentary films and conducts a portfolio of Creative Labs and Fellows programs at Sundance Resort, Sundance Film Festival and elsewhere. Under the direction of Cara Mertes, the DFP also convenes events and forges partnerships globally to draw new resources to the non-fiction field, and to amplify the use of film as a tool for impact and motivate change towards more open and equitable societies. In its ten years, the DFP has supported over 425 films including Kirby Dick's The Invisible War, Patricio Guzmàn's Nostalgia For The Light, Leonard Retel Helmrich's Position Among The Stars, Josh Fox's Gasland, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Trouble The Water, and Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski's Born Into Brothels.

The Pioneer Award is presented by IDA to acknowledge extraordinary contributions to advancing the non- fiction form and providing exceptional vision and leadership to the documentary community. Past recipients of IDA’s Pioneer Award include Alan and Susan Raymond, Rob Epstein, Mel Stuart and Paula Apsell.

For more on the 28th Annual IDA Documentary Awards, please visit the Awards homepage.

Read the full press release here.

In honor of a few highly motivating stories of individuals who have moved mountains to affect change, we gathered three filmmakers from our DocuWeeks Theatrical Showcase and asked them to answer one major question: What does it mean to document change? We asked a seasoned filmmaker Amanda Pope, who lectures on documentary production at USC, to moderate a panel of filmmakers to attempt to answer just this question. Joined by Nicole Karsin (director, We Women Warriors), Patrick Shen (director, La Source), and Sandra Itkoff (producer, Love Free or Die), Amanda set out to get right to the heart of the challenges, joys, and rewarding moments of filming tumultuous and evolving issues.

Amanda opened by asking each of the panelists to give the "elevator pitch" for the films they had entered in DocuWeeks. In case you didn’t have the time to see any of these films in their runs at both IFC Center in New York or Laemmle Noho 7 in Los Angeles, here’s a little bit on each of them:

Love Free or Die is about a man whose two defining passions are in direct conflict: his love for God and his partner Mark. Gene Robinson is the first openly gay person to become a bishop in the historical traditions of Christendom. The film follows Robinson around the world as he calls for all to stand for equality.

La Source tells the uplifting story of Josue Lajuenesse, a Haitian Princeton janitor who returns to his country after the devastating 2010 earthquake to revive his lifelong dream to bring what is most fundamental to his village’s survival: clean water.

We Women Warriors follows three native women caught in the crossfire of Colombia’s warfare who use nonviolent resistance to defend their people’s survival. Colombia has 102 aboriginal groups, one-third of which face extinction because of the conflict. Trapped in a protracted predicament financed by the drug trade, indigenous women are resourcefully leading and creating transformation imbued with hope.

Some major themes of the panel were defining the importance of change in conceiving the initial project, the concept of objectivity or "fairness" in telling a story, and advice on ways to properly prepare for all stages of production.

Each filmmaker took a moment to address the process they went through to conceive and convey the change that would unfold in their stories. Nicole Karsin said that she wanted to show these brave women who were in desperate situations because of armed conflict, and how they overcame their circumstances through bravery and resistance. Along with change obviously comes advocacy, which Nicole agreed was a major reason behind making her film. Sandra jumped in, saying that to every story there is always another side that can be told compassionately. In her film Love Free or Die, they worked hard to show the other side in a good light. Sandra, and everyone on the panel for that matter, understood the importance of respecting the opponent.

Patrick knew how prevalent social issue documentaries are nowadays, and even before he started shooting he decided to take a narrative approach. "We consciously wanted to tell a story about a person," Patrick emphasized.

The conversation then moved on to focus on issues of objectivity. Nicole mentioned early on that she didn't believe in objectivity—everything about the filmmaking process involves a conscious decision, right down to where the camera's lens is pointing. Amanda emphasized how important it is to get permission before one starts filming so that a filmmaker is covered legally by a contract. This doesn't, however, entirely remove ethical responsibility. Your subjects, Amanda said, "will sometimes open up in ways that could be damaging to them socially, morally or politically." This is why it is so important for a filmmaker to consider whether any of the material one has collected could be potentially harmful to one's subjects. "It's important," Amanda stated, to know your subject better than anyone else."

Sandra had just such an experience when she was making her film, Love Free or Die. In the very beginning stages of production, the filmmakers interviewed the bishop of Massachusetts, a man who was gay but never officially came out. He lived a completely closeted life, sitting in in the shadows while Bishop Robinson received death threats and had to publicly defend his sexual orientation at every turn. When he sat down in front of the camera to do an interview for the film, against everyone's expectations, he came out. But Sandra and her team were very careful, sending the bishop a very carefully-worded email telling him that they were keeping that interview in the final cut of the film. Even though they had full intention of keeping that priceless, important moment, they still made the point of informing their subject about their decision before he faced possible public defamation.

Another major theme, preparation, kept appearing throughout the panel. Amanda mentioned that there are always a challenges in documenting a story as it is happening, with problems usually arising due to lack of preparation. "To the extent that you can be prepared," Amanda said, "you can get ready for what is going to happen next." None of the filmmakers on the panel expected their films to take as much time as they did, but in the end Nicole's took six years, Sandra's five, and Patrick's two.

Amanda also suggested that one should think ahead about who the audience will be for one's film. This factors into almost every aspect of the making of one's film, from the marketing to the tone to the music right down to the ultimate goal of distribution. Most subjects and topics have a built-in audience, and digital platforms today make it easier and easier to tap into those groups.

If you would like to watch clips from this and other Doc U panels, please visit our YouTube channel in the coming days. Stay tuned on our Facebook page for even more photos from this and other IDA events!

Part of TheLip.tv, Bring Your Own Doc (BYOD) is an online series dedicated to entertaining, informing, and elevating documentaries in general by bringing attention to films and filmmakers that deserve exposure. And with BYOD signed on a media sponsor of this year's DocuWeeks™ Theatrical Documentary Showcase, participating feature filmmakers had the distinct opportunity of sitting down with co-host and veteran documentary filmmaker Ondi Timoner to discuss any and all aspects of their film.

Two-time Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner (We Live in Public, Dig!) Timoner sat down with four filmmakers from the 16th annual doc showcase this August. In just over one hour, Timoner takes us inside a Brazilian circus with Kelly J Richardson (Without A Net), delves into an artist expose with Jane Weiner (RICKY on LEACOCK), explores one man's quest for clean water with Patrick Shen (La Source), and talks about the man with the most number of Guinness World Records with Brian McGinn (The Record Breaker). In each interview, she discusses what brought these filmmakers to the stories that informed their films, screen clips from each of their projects, the technical aspects of their filmmaking, and other questions that only a fellow documentary filmmaker would know to ask.

To make it easy for you, we've put together a playlist on our YouTube channel so you can watch them all back to back!

Syrian filmmaker and festival director Orwa Nyrabia has been missing since Thursday, August 23 after attempting travel from the Damascus International Airport. Nyrabia works as a film producer and is one of the founders of the DOX BOX International Documentary Film Festival held in Syria. Reuters, Los Angeles Times, Al Jazeera, IDFA, Screen International, RealScreen and many other film organizations have covered the news of Orwa’s disappearance over the last few days.

We, the undersigned, represent tens of thousands of leading filmmakers working around the world. As such, we believe that the artistry and power of film is vital to societies and cultures globally. We strongly defend the right of filmmakers everywhere to practice their art and bring humanity closer together through the telling of our shared stories.

Orwa Nyrabia is not only a celebrated filmmaker, but also an artist who has devoted his life to bringing people and cultures together through film. Although Orwa is now being held in darkness somewhere, the filmmaking world is paying attention will continue to shine a light on him until he is safely reunited with his family. We call for his immediate return.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Big Sky Documentary Film Festival
BRITDOC Foundation
The D-Word
Directors Guild of America
DOC NYC
Docs in Progress
The Documentary Center, George Washington University
European Documentary Network
Film Independent
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
IFP
Independent Lens
International Documentary Association
International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam
ITVS
Kartemquin Films
POV
Producers Guild of America
San Francisco Film Society
The Scottish Documentary Institute
Stranger Than Fiction
Sundance Institute
Tribeca Film Festival
Tribeca Film Institute
True/False Film Fest
Women Make Movies
Writers Guild of America, West