Whether we are unemployed creatives, overwhelmed freelancers, or underpaid employees, it can often seem like everyone else has figured it out. Social media is a constant stream of people announcing new jobs, festival screenings, and prestigious grants and awards. Yet more often than not, the filmmaker who had the big premiere, received all the accolades, and even successfully sold their film is still struggling to get by, just like the rest of us. So how are filmmakers actually making a living?

"It's about time there was an organization just for us. An organization whose sole purpose is ‘to encourage and to honor the documentary arts and sciences; to promote nonfiction film and video; to support the efforts of nonfiction film and video makers all over the world." Excerpt from the invitation letter sent out by Linda Buzell to the documentary community in 1982. 42 years ago, on February 6, 1982, in Los Angeles, 75 members of the documentary field convened for the first meeting of what would become the International Documentary Association. The meeting stemmed from a grassroots appeal

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 people have spoken. The 38th edition of the IDA Documentary Awards is now part of IDA lore, but you, as IDA Members, can still check out the Member Voting Portal through December 17 at 11:59 p.m. PT to watch the nominees and winners in the Features and Shorts categories, including multi winners All That Breathes (Best Director—Shaunak Sen; Best Editing—Charlotte Munch Bengtsen, Vedant Joshi; Pare Lorentz Award) and Fire of Love (Best Cinematography

A Letter From Hajnal Molnar-Szakacs, Director of Artist Accelerator Program at Sundance Institute Nonfiction storytellers and their work have been deeply impacted by recent world events, public health crises, and overdue reckonings. The impact on the field has been far-reaching and complex. This has manifested in various ways including the ongoing need to address sustainability, safety, and security, as well as a desire for holistic culture change to make the field more inclusive, accessible, and grounded in values-based ethics-first filmmaking practice. Six years ago, Sundance Institute and

By KRISTAL SOTOMAYOR and EDDIE Hustleby The 2022 IDA Documentary Awards Call For Entries (CFE) launches on Thursday, May 26! The IDA Documentary Awards are a crucial event in our field. Nominations can elevate a documentarian’s career and their project’s global impact. Last year’s nominees have gone on to win many accolades: Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature; Suave won the Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting; and nine IDA Documentary Awards nominees received Peabody Award nominations. In this post, the people

In the crowded documentary field, short documentaries don’t always get the love they deserve. Our friends at Argo understand this well and have built a whole platform that celebrates and streams short films. We are excited to partner with Argo to highlight their latest playlist A Sense of Place, which includes four documentary shorts that were nominated for IDA Documentary Awards in previous years. IDA Members with a Doc Maker membership or higher get three months of complimentary exclusive access to Argo. To learn how to access your Argo benefit, visit here. Not an IDA Member? You can visit

Completing and promoting a film under "normal" circumstances is difficult enough, but imagine the impossibility of pulling this off in the midst of a pandemic! That’s exactly what our IDA Documentary Screening Series grantees managed to do. This year, IDA supported 11 filmmakers from historically underrepresented communities through its in-kind grants, in an effort to help minimize the financial costs associated with pursuing a film awards campaign, and support a more equitable documentary culture. Here is a short conversation with some of our 2020-2021 grantees. What was the most challenging

It is no secret that documentary filmmaking has a complicated legacy when it comes to supporting the survivors of gender-based violence. Even with the best intentions, many filmmakers fall into dangerous extractive patterns and use practices that end up doing more harm than good for a participant. Last week, IDA and the Documentary Accountability Working Group hosted a panel discussion on how filmmakers and journalists can ethically tell these important stories without harming survivors. Here are six key takeaways from the discussion, as well as suggestions and resources for a trauma-informed

When the IDA Documentary Screening Series launched eight years ago in place of its annual DocuWeeks™ theatrical showcase, the goal was to present the most critically acclaimed documentaries of the year to awards voters and IDA members in both Los Angeles and New York City. While the purpose and goal of the Screening Series has not changed since its inception, the program has grown dramatically over the years. We went from screening 15 films in 2014 to nearly 50 films over four months in 2019. This enormous industry growth has led to an increasingly expensive and complex awards campaign model