A young bartender in the Bronx, a coal miner’s daughter in West Virginia, a grieving mother in Nevada and a registered nurse in Missouri build a movement of insurgent candidates challenging powerful incumbents in Congress. One of their races will become the most shocking political upset in recent American history.
Our Grantees
We award $1.2 million annually in production and development grants directly to documentarians through our IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund, Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund, IDA Netflix Global Emerging Filmmaker Award, IDA Sarowitz Project Completion Fund, and Logan Elevate Grant.
When a thriving, highly-successful African American public elementary school is threatened to be replaced by a new high school that favors the community’s wealthier residents, parents, students and educators fight for the elementary school’s survival.
Life After interrogates the contradictory political ideologies surrounding death and disability while coalescing the missing voices of the disabled community in the contemporary debate around
Facing deportation, hundreds of refugee children in Sweden have become afflicted with Resignation Syndrome, withdrawing from the world into a coma-like state, as if frozen, for months, or even years.
In many rural villages across the Democratic Republic of Congo, there is little to no power or visibility once the sun sets other than from firewood or kerosene lamps.
Loira Limbal is an Afro-Dominican filmmaker and DJ interested in the creation of art that is nuanced and revelatory for communities of color.
In 1965, Wendell Berry returned home to Henry County, where he bought a small farm house and began a life of farming, writing and teaching.
In America’s capital of wrongful conviction, a man is imprisoned at 19 for a murder and rape he didn’t commit – and spends nearly a quarter century fighting to be freed.
Three women find purpose carrying babies for strangers in the conservative heartland of Boise, Idaho - the unregulated and unofficial “surrogacy capital” of the United States - even as they put their own lives at risk.
Synopsis
Three pioneering women navigate the bumpy expansion of the biggest Chinese industrial zone in Ethiopia.
The story of long-buried, widespread sexual abuse at America’s preeminent children’s theater, and the survivors who came forward to hold their abusers and the institution that harbored them accountable.
Mama Bears is a feature-length documentary that explores the many ways in which the lives of conservative, Christian mothers are impacted and utterly transformed when they decide to affirm and advocate on behalf of their LGBTQ children.
Manuel Acuña works as a film director and cinematographer, from Guadalajara, Jal. México.
In a remote Chinese village, a peasant family survived wars, revolution, and a devastating famine. Hardship eventually forced the family to scatter.
With startling and unprecedented access, MAYOR follows a charismatic leader's quest to build the city of the future in a land paralyzed by its past.
Synopsis
Doris Muñoz is an ambitious music manager whose undocumented family depends on her ability to discover aspiring pop stars.
Before Oprah, before Arsenio, there was Mr. SOUL! Ellis Haizlip makes television broadcast history with SOUL!, America's first "black Tonight Show."
Murders that Matter documents Movita Johnson-Harrell an African American Muslim mother who, in the aftermath of her youngest son’s murder, vows to save all the other Black sons, on both sides of the gun.
My Country, No More takes an intimate look inside the lives and hopes of one North Dakota farming community in response to a fundamental question: what are we willing to sacrifice in our pursuit of progress?
Synopsis
The arrest of three homebirth midwives serving Amish and Mennonite communities in upstate New York ignites a legislative fight for freedom of choice in birthi
Dadabhoy is a Pakistani-American director and cinematographer from California.
Netizens delves into the lives of three women profoundly impacted by online harassment, following as they confront digital abuse and strive for equality and justice online.
In the aftermath of the worst mass shooting of schoolchildren in American history, Newtown documents a traumatized community fractured by grief and driven toward a sense of purpose. Joining the ranks of a growing club to which no one wants to belong, a cast of characters within Newtown and beyond interconnect to weave an intimate story of community resilience.
When 32-year-old activist and father Ady Barkan is diagnosed with ALS and given four years to live, he finds himself in a deep depression, struggling to connect with his young son, whose presence r
After becoming a mother, a filmmaker uncovers the untold history of China’s one-child policy and the generations of parents and children forever shaped by this social experiment.
Synopsis
Sidhanta, a fisherman, fights to protect India's fast-vanishing ape species, the Hoolock Gibbons in his village nestled in Northeast India.
Overburden is the story of a fiery, pro-coal right-winger and a tenacious, environmentalist grandmother whose lives are thrust together when a mine disaster shatters their community.
A multi-billion dollar American development is poised to engulf a small coastal community in Mexico with a mega hotel/condo complex.
Paula Palacios is a Spanish documentary filmmaker primarily interested in producing films about women and refugees.
Radical civil rights attorney, Larry Krasner, leads a band of activists who set out to end mass incarceration by taking over the agency at its center: the district attorney’s office. Embedded behind closed doors, the film watches an unprecedented criminal justice experiment unfold to ask: can outsiders reform a system from within?
As cowboys meet at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, they confront myths, old and new, to try and save the land they love.
Zimbabwe is at a crossroads. The new leader of the opposition party, MDC, Nelson Chamisa, is challenging the old guard, ZANU-PF, represented by the acting president Emmerson Mnangagwa.
A group of survivors of sexual abuse by Catholic priests battle for justice and collaborate to create fictional scenes depicting rituals of power in the church.