IDA Documentary Awards

This piece was first published in Documentary ’s Winter 2024/2025 issue, with the following subheading: What does the makeup of films awarded at IDA’s

Sometimes, when I'm not crying, I joke that my life has become its own nightmarish version of The Twilight Zone: the ostensibly well-intentioned documentary filmmaker gets a dark cosmic reality check when he becomes the subject of one of his own films. In the twenty years I've worked in documentary, nearly every independent film I've made was about people losing their homes and their sense of community. And now that my home, my neighborhood, and my community were engulfed in the Eaton Fires, everything feels both horribly new and strangely familiar.

For the past eight years, the making of Shiori Ito’s feature debut, Black Box Diaries, has consumed the majority of her life. A riveting portrait of

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

Los Angeles, CA – The International Documentary Association (IDA) announced the nominations in 18 categories for the 38th annual IDA Documentary Awards, which will be held on December 10, 2022, at the Paramount Theater on the Paramount Studios Lot in Los Angeles.

By KRISTAL SOTOMAYOR and EDDIE Hustleby The 2022 IDA Documentary Awards Call For Entries (CFE) launches on Thursday, May 26! The IDA Documentary

FLEE wins Best Feature, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson wins Best Director for Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), and A Broken House wins Best Short.

Since 2003, IDA has presented the Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award to a filmmaker whose early work exhibits extraordinary promise and expands the

I always imagine Jean Tsien in constant motion, even though her work as an editor and producer usually means hours of sitting at a computer. Her films