Today we announced the honorees for the 42nd Annual IDA Documentary Awards, including a Career Achievement Award for the late Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán. The Awards will take place December 4, 2026, at The Ebell of Los Angeles, hosted for the second year in a row by documentary field leader Tabitha Jackson.
Guzmán, who passed away in September 2026, made Chile's history and memory his life's work. IDA is deeply honored that he agreed to accept this award in the weeks before his passing, and his longtime producer and friend Alexandra Galvis will accept it on his behalf. The Career Achievement Award is presented annually to a filmmaker who, through a body of work, has made a major and lasting contribution to the documentary form.
Amy Goodman and Juan González of Democracy Now!, enduring voices in independent journalism and co-hosts of one of the leading U.S.-based independent daily news broadcasts in the world, will receive the Truth to Power Award for their steadfast support of documentary filmmakers and their daily work to shine a light on the stories that many powerful figures around the world would rather go untold.
Maia Lekow and Christopher King, who bring East African stories to the world stage, will receive the Emerging Filmmaker Award, given annually to filmmakers who, by virtue of their early work, show extraordinary promise in exploring the possibilities of the nonfiction art form.
Cannes Docs, the documentary program of the Marché du Film led by Pierre-Alexis Chevit, will receive the Amicus Award for its role connecting documentaries with festivals and distributors worldwide. The Amicus Award is presented to individuals or organizations in recognition of their work supporting the essential needs of the nonfiction media landscape.
Dominic Willsdon, IDA Executive Director, said: "We are honoring a documentary filmmaker whose work spanned more than fifty years alongside a filmmaking team whose feature work is now taking shape, and with them legendary journalists and pioneering festival programmers who share and support the goals of our field. We are especially grateful that Patricio Guzmán accepted this award in the weeks before his death. It means a great deal to celebrate him in the company of so many people carrying forward what international documentary filmmaking can be."
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.
About Patricio Guzmán (Career Achievement Award)
Patricio Guzmán was a symbol of inspiration for international filmmakers from all over the world, and all ages and generations. Beyond his amazing body of work, his filmmaking made a major contribution to the documentary form.
Guzmán dedicated his career to documentary cinema. His films screened in many festivals and received international recognition. Between 1972 and 1979, he directed "The Battle of Chile", a five-hour trilogy about Salvador Allende’s period of government and its fall. This film is the foundation of his cinema. The North American magazine CINEASTE named it "one of the 10 best political films in the world." After Pinochet’s “coup d’état”, Guzmán was arrested and imprisoned for two weeks in the National Stadium, where he was repeatedly threatened by simulated executions. In 1973, he left Chile and moved to Cuba, then to Spain and France, but remained very attached to his country and its history. He presided over the International Documentary Festival in Santiago de Chile (FIDOCS), which he created in 1997. "The Cordillera of Dreams", presented in the official selection at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, closed a trilogy which began with "Nostalgia for the Light" (Cannes 2010) and "The Pearl Button" (Berlin 2015). His last film, "My Imaginary Country", was presented at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.
IDA Board member Paula Ossandón said: “In Patricio Guzmán’s cinema, documentary breathes as a vessel for memory and reflection on our collective social histories. IDA sought to honor this legacy, which has profoundly shaped generations of filmmakers around the world. Patricio was able to express his joy at receiving this recognition. Though he left us unexpectedly before the awards ceremony, his work endures—as does the memory he so steadfastly championed throughout his life.”
About Amy Goodman and Juan González, Democracy Now! (Truth to Power Award)
Amy Goodman is an award-winning investigative journalist, author, and the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, which airs on more than 1,500 public television and radio stations worldwide. Her honors include the George Polk Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award. The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard awarded her 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." She is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, most recently Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America (2016).
Juan González has co-hosted Democracy Now! since 1996. He was a staff columnist for New York's Daily News from 1987 to 2016. His investigative reporting on urban policy, race relations, the labor movement, and Latin America earned two George Polk Awards for commentary. In 2015 he became the first Latino inducted into the Society of Professional Journalists New York Journalism Hall of Fame. He has written five books, including 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. He was one of the founders of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and served as its president from 2002 to 2004. He is a Senior Fellow at the Great Cities Institute of the University of Illinois Chicago.
About Maia Lekow and Christopher King (Emerging Filmmaker Award)
Maia Lekow and Christopher King are a Kenyan-Australian husband-and-wife filmmaking team and the co-founders of Nairobi-based Circle & Square Productions. For over fifteen years they have made cinematic documentaries that pair intimate, character-driven storytelling with visually immersive filmmaking. Their work explores identity, history, culture, memory, and social change across East Africa.
Their debut feature, The Letter (2019), premiered at IDFA and was 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. It went on to win 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 screened at IDFA, Sheffield DocFest, Sydney Film Festival, and True/False Film Festival, among many others.
Lekow and King are in post-production on their third feature documentary, set on the Kenyan coast and scheduled for release in 2027.
About Cannes Docs (Amicus Award)
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.
About Tabitha Jackson
Tabitha Jackson is the Director of Film Forum, New York City's sole autonomous nonprofit cinema and, for more than fifty years, a defining institution of independent film culture in the United States. She arrived there after a thirty-year career across the independent media ecosystem. She worked in public broadcasting in the UK at the BBC and Channel 4, and executive produced documentary film at Film4. She led the Sundance Institute's Documentary Film Program for seven years. She then became the first woman and person of color appointed Director of the Sundance Film Festival, where she stewarded two pandemic editions that required fundamentally reimagining what a festival could be and who it could be for. Those questions, of who cinema can be for and how its animating values of free 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 research fellow at MIT's Open Documentary Lab.
About IDA & the IDA Documentary Awards
International Documentary Association (IDA) supports the vital work of documentary storytellers and champions a thriving and inclusive documentary culture. Founded in 1982, IDA connects audiences with the best of the form, provides resources to filmmakers, builds community, and defends the rights and freedoms of documentary artists, activists and journalists around the globe.
This year’s 42nd Annual IDA Documentary Awards will be an evening of celebration and community held on December 4, 2026, at The Ebell of 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, IDA has 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, Werner Herzog, Asif Kapadia, Spike Lee, Michael Moore, Laura Poitras, Robert Redford, and Agnès Varda, as well as iconic films like Citizenfour, 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.
IDA Documentary Awards are sponsored by:
Open Society Foundations
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Spaht Family Foundation
California Arts Council
Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture
ABC News VideoSource
For IDA Documentary Awards sponsorship opportunities, contact development@documentary.org
Learn more and purchase tickets for the 2026 IDA Documentary Awards at https://www.documentary.org/awards2026.