Join us at the 2026 Awards! Tickets now available for purchase.
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The IDA Documentary Awards is an annual ceremony celebrating excellence in global nonfiction filmmaking. Presented by International Documentary Association (IDA) since 1984, it was the first awards program in the U.S. dedicated exclusively to documentaries and remains among the most prominent documentary-specific awards competitions worldwide.
This year’s 42nd Annual IDA Documentary Awards will be an evening of celebration and community held on December 4, 2026, at The Ebell in Los Angeles, hosted by documentary field leader Tabitha Jackson. At a time when filmmakers face critical distribution and funding challenges, IDA looks forward to gathering and uplifting this irrepressible global community and introducing their work to new audiences.
For the first time this year, IDA will present an award for Best Documentary Not in the English Language. Building on our commitment to financial accessibility for filmmakers in the US and globally, we have also introduced discounted submission pricing for certain regions of the world and for independent filmmakers.
In the four-plus decades IDA has presented the Documentary Awards, it has honored giants of the field like Sir David Attenborough, Ken Burns, Jacques Cousteau, Ava DuVernay, Patricio Guzmán, Werner Herzog, Asif Kapadia, Spike Lee, Michael Moore, Laura Poitras, Robert Redford, and Agnès Varda, as well as iconic films like Citizen Four, An Inconvenient Truth, I Am Not Your Negro, Minding the Gap, No Other Land, OJ: Made in America, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Summer of Soul, and Waltz with Bashir.
Key Dates*
- Shortlist Announcement: October 22, 2026
- IDA Member Viewing (Shortlist ONLY): November 2 - November 17, 2026
- Nominee Announcement: November 17, 2026
- IDA Member Viewing (Nominees ONLY): November 17 - November 27, 2026
- IDA Member Voting Period**: November 17 - November 27, 2026
- IDA Member Viewing (Shortlist and Select films): November 28 - December 31, 2026
- Awards Ceremony: December 4, 2026, The Ebell Los Angeles
- IDA Virtual Viewing Platform closes: December 31, 2026
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*All dates are subject to change.
**IDA Member Voting is for Best Feature and Best Short Documentary categories only. All other category winners are selected by blue-ribbon juries.
IDA welcomes back our host for the 2026 IDA Documentary Awards, Tabitha Jackson
Tabitha Jackson is the Director of Film Forum, a nonprofit New York movie theatre and a defining institution of independent film culture in the United States. She has moved through the independent media ecosystem from public broadcasting and executive producing theatrical documentary in the UK, to leading the Sundance Institute's Documentary Film Program and becoming Director of the Sundance Film Festival. Questions around who cinema can be for, and how its animating values of human expression and exchange can be cultivated, defended, and amplified now shape her work at Film Forum. Jackson is an Emmy-winning director-producer, a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and was a fellow at MIT's Open Documentary Lab.
Call For Entries: CLOSED
See Key Dates + Rules and Regulations, here.