The call for entries of our annual DocuWeeks™ program is now live. Get the full 2009 entry information here.
IDA DocuWeeks™ helps to qualify outstanding new feature and short documentaries for Academy Award® consideration, by providing its participants with a seven-day commercial theatrical run in Los Angeles County and in the Borough of Manhattan. (Shorts will screen in the County of Los Angeles only, per Academy requirements.)
Why should you enter? We'll let our ever-expanding list of past DocuWeeks™ participants fill you in.
"Kudos to DocuWeek and its Theatrical Showcase, a wonderful screening program that is well-curated and generous to films that don't have distributors in place. thanks to Docuweek, important, little noticed films can qualify for the Academy Awards and be seen in great theaters."
-- Alex Gibney, Academy Award winner, Taxi to the Dark Side (2007)
"The IDA provides an extremely valuable service to filmmakers with Docuweek. It's unlikely I would have been able to qualify my films for Academy consideration without it."
--James Longley, Academy Award nominee, Sari's Mother (2007); Iraq in Fragments (2006)
"DocuWeek is a must! In a highly competitive and ever-changing theatrical market, DocuWeek allows documentary films to be qualified for the big awards. It's a great way to showcase films at a theatre with other documentaries before deciding on a release plan or a distributor."
--Amy Berg, Academy Award nominee, Deliver Us from Evil (2006)
"In 2006, the selection of our film The Blood of Yingzhou District for IDA's DocuWeek marked the beginning of the road to winning an Oscar that year.
Our recent short film, Tongzhi in Love (2008), is every bit as beautiful a film—maybe more beautiful—but (ominous music starts here) it wasn't ready in time for the IDA and we handled Oscar qualification, yes, ourselves. We made the Academy Short List in October 2008, so we now had a better than 50/50 chance of a nomination. The devil had us in his hand; we were rehearsing our speech, picking out (in Ruby's case) her gown (I wasn't going to wear a gown) and...you know what happened next.
The moral of this story is clear: Go with IDA.”
--Thomas Lennon & Ruby Yang, Academy Award winners, The Blood of Yingzhou District (2006)
Not convinced? See the rundown from last year's event here. Read more past participants' quotes, see a list of notable past documentaries selected for IDA's DocuWeeks™ and find out more about the 2009 program here.