2023 IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund Production Grant submissions were reviewed by Aiko Masubuchi, Andrew Nadkarni, Arianne Ayu Alizio, Ash Goh Hua, Camila Guarda Velasco, Che Applewhaite, Chen Wanling, Cyrielle Raingou, Donna Kozloskie, Dr. Grishma Shah, Emerson Goo, Emily Abi-Kheirs, George Lavender, Julia Gunnison, Justin Nguyen, Mostafa Youssef, Pauly Denetclaw, Sana Malik, Scarlett Robertson, Serra Ciliv, Viknesh Kobinathan.
2023 Enterprise Documentary Fund Production Grantees
- #Nunstoo
About the Project
In a revelation never before spoken, a small group of nuns exposes a tormented truth within the Catholic Church: the harrowing tales of predatory priests abusing nuns. Shockwaves ripple through religious women determined to defy their second-class status as they ignite a movement to demand the justice they have long yearned for.
Project Team
Lorena Luciano
Lorena Luciano is an accomplished documentary film director and editor, recognized for her exceptional work in the motion pictures and TV industry (HBO, NETFLIX, JIGSAW Productions, YouTube Originals, EPIX/MGM+, RAI Italian Public TV, SKY TV, CANAL+). With a remarkable track record that includes receiving prestigious accolades such as an Emmy win, grants from the Sundance Institute and MacArthur Foundation, and numerous industry recognitions such as Best Directing and Best Documentary awards, Lorena has established herself as a leading force in her field.
Her ability to seamlessly blend artistic vision with technical expertise has resulted in critically acclaimed films that captivate audiences worldwide. Her work has been translated into over 10 different languages and distributed worldwide.
Filippo Piscopo
Emmy® Award winner Filippo Piscopo intersects his true passion as a film producer with impactful camera work.
Inspired by content resonating with diverse audiences, Filippo has crafted engaging stories supported, among other entities, by the Sundance Institute and featured at film venues such as the Venice Film Festival, IDFA’s Central Pitch, and the IFP's Spotlight on Documentaries.
Granted the Social Justice Award by Amy Goodman, Filippo’s documentary work, often in collaboration with his wife and film director/partner Lorena Luciano, has opened to good reviews by mainstream media such as Variety and the New York Times and has been distributed globally.
- Confidential Project
About the Project
Confidential Project.
Project Team
Petra Costa
Petra Costa tells stories in the crossroads between the personal and the political. In 2020, The Edge of Democracy, was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Peabody and Platino Award. In 2012, she directed Elena, which premiered at IDFA and won best film at Havana Film Festival (2013). In 2015, she co-directed Olmo and the Seagull with Lea Glob, winning the young jury prize in Locarno. She was involved in the production of Ecstasy, Babenco and Beba.
Alessandra Orofino
Alessandra Orofino is a writer, director and producer who for the past 6 years has been the showrunner on the weekly hit comedy news show Greg News, on HBO Latin America. She is also an experienced co-founder and non-profit leader with a background in community organizing and activism. In 2011, she launched NOSSAS, a Brazilian NGO, and grew to its current size, with 54 staff and a substantial budget - mostly raised through international philanthropy. Prior to that, she was a founding team member and head of the Brazil office at Purpose, a NYC-based agency. In 2014, she spoke at the TED Global stage. In 2019, she was selected as a fellow by the Obama Foundation. In 2022, she was honored with the Skoll Social Innovation Award. Her thoughts have been published in Folha de São Paulo, Le Monde, Libération, El País, Stanford Social Innovation Review and The New York Times. She is the Executive Producer of Beba (2021).
- Hawa
About the Project
40 YEARS after her arranged marriage as a child, Hawa is eager to finally begin an independent life and to be literate. However, with the return of the Taliban to power her dreams, and those of her daughter and grand-daughter are shattered.
Project Team
Najiba Noori
NAJIBA NOORI was born in 1995 in Iran. She began working for media organizations as a volunteer when she was just 15. She has participated in several workshops for photography and filmmaking in Kabul, Afghanistan. She has made reports and photo stories for various organizations and agencies, including the AFP, Huffington Post, MSF, FMIC, NRC, and UN Women in Afghanistan. She participated in the Close-Up program 2020-2021 and IDFA Academy 2022. She joined AFP as a video journalist in 2019. In 2021, she left her country when the Taliban took power in Afghanistan and lives in France. Hawa is her first feature-length documentary.
Christian Popp
Producer on Hawa documentary.
- Life After
About the Project
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 medically assisted suicide.
Project Team
Reid Davenport
Reid Davenport (Director) makes films about disability from an overtly political perspective. His first feature documentary, I Didn't See You There, won the U.S. Documentary Directing Award at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Davenport was named a 2020 DOC NYC 40 Under 40 Filmmaker, a 2020 Points North Fellow, a 2020 Creative Capital Recipient, and a 2017 TED Fellow. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University.
Colleen Cassingham
Colleen Cassingham is a producer at Multitude Films, where her work focuses on politically committed artful nonfiction. Most recently, she produced the Queer Futures shorts collection in association with Chicken & Egg Pictures (CPH:DOX 2023) and is currently producing Reid Davenport's second feature, Life After. Colleen co-produced It's Only Life After All, about the Indigo Girls (Sundance 2023), and her credits as Associate Producer include Pray Away (Tribeca 2020), Through Our Eyes: Apart (Provincetown 2020), Call Center Blues (SXSW 2020), Always In Season (2019), The Feeling Of Being Watched (Tribeca 2018), and Love the Sinner (Tribeca 2017), which have been distributed by Netflix, Topic, HBOMax, POV, and Independent Lens. She is a 2023 Sundance Producing Fellow and a 2023 Impact Partners Producers Fellow. She was a Video Consortium/Sony 2021 Mentor, a 2019 Points North fellow, and a 2018 UnionDocs Collaborative Studio fellow.
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Jess Devaney
Jessica Devaney (Producer) is a Brooklyn-based producer and the founder and president of Multitude Films. Her latest films include Netflix Original Pray Away in partnership with Ryan Murphy and Blumhouse, Oscar-shortlisted Call Center Blues (Topic), and Apart, an episode of the Sesame Workshop series Through Our Eyes (HBO Max). She also produced Sundance award-winning and IDA-nominated Always in Season (Independent Lens 2020), Livingston Reporting award-winning The Feeling of Being Watched (POV 2019), dubbed “a real-world conspiracy thriller” by Variety, and Peabody-nominated Roll Red Roll (POV, Netflix 2019). Additional credits include Critic’s Choice-nominated Speed Sisters (Netflix), American Psychological Association award-winning Love the Sinner (Amazon), and Call Her Ganda (POV). Her films have screened at top festivals, including Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca, BlackStar, and Telluride. Jessica founded QueerDoc and the Queer Producers Network and was a Sundance Edit and Story Lab fellow, Women at Sundance fellow, and Sundance Creative Producing Lab advisor. She received DOC NYC and TOPIC’s inaugural 40 Under 40 Award and the 2019 Cinereach Producers Award.
Lyntoria Newton
Lyntoria Newton (Co-Producer) is a documentary filmmaker and producer based in Chicago. She has produced content for outlets such as The Boston Globe, The University of Michigan and The Ford Foundation, and produced two seasons of Basic Able, a satirical podcast created by Reid Davenport devoted to disrupting ableism. She served as an impact producer on the feature documentary Mossville: When Great Trees Fall, which premiered at Full Frame where it won the Human Rights Award, as well as the If/Then short doc Status Pending. She has taught documentary filmmaking courses at the Bay Area Video Coalition, San Francisco Film School and Northwestern University. Lyntoria holds an M.F.A. in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University.
- The Phantom Pain of Rojava
About the Project
In 2015 the Kurdish guerrillas - both men and women - were praised as heroes by the world. They had fought against ISIS and won, but soon after, their allies left the region and the world’s spotlight changed focus. Today, many of the guerrillas are badly injured without arms or legs, and live in houses for wounded soldiers. In this film we follow five friends; Rojda who is blind, Fadakhar who lost two legs, Zarin who was shot in the head, Sorkhin with metal in her whole body and Viyan, the folk singer who tells the story of Rojava and the dream of freedom. This is a film about life after war and also about the strength of continuing to fight for a dignified life.
Project Team
Maryam Ebrahimi
Maryam Ebrahimi, director, studied art at the Art Faculty in Tehran and continued her education in Sweden at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design. Later she started to work as a producer and director in the documentary field. She co-directed No Burquas Behind Bars (2012), set in an Afghan women’s prison, and produced I Was Worth 50 Sheep (2010) and Prison Sisters (2016). Her last feature as a director is Stronger Than A Bullet which premiered at IDFA 2017. Maryam is a Chicken & Egg 2021 Award recipient.
Stina Gardell
Stina Gardell founded Mantaray Film in 2005 and has since produced 29 documentaries and co-produced 10 international documentaries. She has twice been awarded Best Documentary at Prix Italia, in addition to a number of prestigious film awards. Her most recent production, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, premiered at Sundance 2021 and was picked up by Films Boutique. Her film Ingrid Bergman In Her Own Words (2015) premiered at Cannes, where it received a Golden Eye Special Mention. And Joyce Carol Oates - A Body in the Service of Mind premiered in Telluride 2021.
- The River
About the Project
The River is a vivid, character-driven film about Louisiana’s complicated relationship with the Mississippi River.
Project Team
Caitlyn Greene
Caitlyn is a filmmaker born to a long line of Louisiana Cajuns and raised in the American South, who now splits her time between Brooklyn and New Orleans. She loves complex tales that break the mold and has crafted them in everything from six-second shorts to six-part series.
Caitlyn received a Primetime Emmy and an ACE Eddie Award for her editing on The Jinx, HBO’s Peabody Award-winning documentary series. Her recent documentary short, The Diamond, was acquired by The New Yorker after premiering at the Camden International Film Festival, where it won CIFF’s Vimeo Staff Pick Award. Her previous short films have screened at festivals around the world and taken home several jury awards along with a Vimeo Staff Picks’ Best of the Year.
Other editing projects include the vérité documentary feature WHEN LAMBS BECOME LIONS, for which Caitlyn was awarded Best Editing at the Tribeca Festival and nominated for an IDA Documentary Award, as well as FX’s documentary series A Wilderness of Error from Marc Smerling (The Jinx) and Errol Morris.
The River is Caitlyn’s feature directorial debut.
Sara Archambault
Sara Archambault is a Creative Producer dedicated to artful and impactful nonfiction filmmaking. Sara champions risk-taking films with bold visions that center on a practice of equity, care, collaboration, and justice in their creation. Recent films include Riotsville, USA (Sundance, Magnolia Pictures); Truth or Consequences (Rotterdam, Sentient Art Films), A Decent Home (Denver, America Reframed), and the upcoming Richland. Sara's award-winning films have screened in festivals around the world and received support from Sundance Film Institute, SFFILM, Catapult Film Fund, IDA, Hot Docs Pitch Forum, and Film Independent, among others. Sara was a 2020 Impact Partners Producing Fellow, a 2013 Sundance Creative Producers Lab Fellow, and a 2020 SF DocFest Vanguard Awardee.
- The Strike
About the Project
A generation of California men endure decades of solitary confinement and, against all odds, launch a protest to regain their freedom.
Project Team
JoeBill Muñoz
JoeBill Muñoz (Director/Producer) is a Mexican-American director and producer. He’s recently produced several television series for Left/Right Media and The New York Times, and is currently directing and producing an independent feature documentary about solitary confinement in California prisons. His most recent film, Maletero, was commissioned by ITVS and premiered on PBS in 2023. As a producer, he’s worked on The Circus (Showtime), The New York Times Presents (Hulu), and The Grab (TIFF 2022), a feature documentary directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite in collaboration with Reveal at the Center for Investigative Reporting. His independent work has been supported by the Sundance Documentary Fund, Firelight Media, ITVS, SFFILM, the Reva and David Logan Foundation, and others. Originally from Houston, Texas, he currently resides in New York City.
Lucas Guilkey
Lucas Guilkey (Director/Producer) is an award-winning documentary film producer and journalist based in Oakland, California. He is currently directing and producing a feature documentary about solitary confinement in California prisons, developed in the SFFILM FilmHouse residency and the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program. He recently served as story producer on Aftershock, a feature documentary about the US maternal health crisis that premiered at Sundance in 2022 and is streaming on Hulu/Disney+. His directorial debut, What Happened to Dujuan Armstrong?, a short documentary about the coverup of a young man’s death in county jail, won best documentary at the BAFTA Student Film Awards and was nominated for best documentary short at the Social Impact Media Awards (SIMA). He is a graduate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Wesleyan University.
- And So It Begins
About the Project
Can kindness, truth and hope for democracy emerge victorious in an epic battle with fear, lies and surrender to autocracy? Can light conquer darkness? However it ends, the story serves as a testimony to the power of volunteerism and a cautionary tale about the consequences — for better or worse — of choices made.
Project Team
Ramona Diaz
Ramona S. Diaz is a Peabody, Gotham, IDA, Emmy award-winning, PGA, and Independent Spirit award-nominated Asian American filmmaker best known for her compelling character-driven documentaries that combine a profound appreciation for cinematic aesthetics and potent storytelling. Ramona’s films have demonstrated her ability to gain intimate access to the people she films – be they rock stars, first ladies, dissidents, mothers, teachers, or journalists – resulting in keenly observed moments and unforgettable nuanced narratives. Her films have been screened and won awards at Sundance, Berlin, Busan, Tribeca, SXSW, IDFA, HotDocs, and many other top-tier film festivals. Ramona’s feature-length independently-produced films— Imelda (IL, 2004), The Learning (POV,2011), Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey (IL, 2012), Motherland (POV, 2017), A Thousand Cuts (Frontline, 2020)—have been nationally broadcast on PBS, Arte, and the BBC amongst others. Ramona is both a Guggenheim Fellow and a USA Fellow – prestigious awards given to artists with singular visions who have significantly contributed to the arts in the United States. She was recently named the inaugural McGurn Family Trust Resident in Film by the American Academy in Rome. Ramona is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the Producers and Writers Guilds of America. In 2017, she received a Women at Sundance Fellowship, a Creative Capital Award, and a Chicken & Egg Pictures Filmmaker Award. For the past ten years, Ramona has served as a film envoy for the U.S. State Department’s American Film Showcase in partnership with USC and, more recently, for Film Independent’s Global Media Makers program. Ramona is a graduate of Emerson College and holds an M.A. from Stanford University.
Raney Aronson Rath
Director/Producer of This is How It Ends.
- To Use a Mountain
About the Project
Physics, geology, and democracy collide across the expansive American interior, in a series of vignettes from six candidate sites for a sacrificial nuclear dumping ground.
Project Team
Casey Carter
Casey Carter is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary designer whose work engages nonfiction storytelling in film, photography, data visualization, and cartography. Working through a mixture of portraiture, landscape, and evidentiary documents and media, his work centers on themes of governmentality, geography, and environmentalism. He was a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Film/Video Artist Fellow, a 2019 Points North Fellow, and a 2017-2018 UnionDocs Collaborative Studio Fellow. His work as project director for Maya Lin’s What Is Missing? Foundation, won the 2023 Webby Awards for Best Activism Website as well as Best Navigation/Structure for desktop and mobile websites. His interdisciplinary background (BS in Physics, BS in Photography, M.Arch, M.S. in Design Health) informs his work across media, art, and design.
Colleen Cassingham
Colleen Cassingham (Producer) is a producer at Multitude Films focused on politically committed artful nonfiction that pushes formal boundaries. She is currently producing Reid Davenport’s second feature, Life After, about how disabled folks continue to die under the guise of assisted suicide, as well as a short series called Queer Futures, in association with Chicken & Egg Pictures. Her credits as Associate Producer include Pray Away (Tribeca 2020), Through Our Eyes: Apart (Provincetown 2020), Call Center Blues (SXSW 2020), Always in Season, which won the Special Jury Prize for Moral Urgency at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, The Feeling of Being Watched (Tribeca 2018), and Love the Sinner (Tribeca 2017), which have been distributed by Netflix, Topic, HBOMax, POV, and Independent Lens. Colleen’s directorial debut short, From Damascus to Chicago, was broadcast on POV in 2017 and was an Editor’s Pick at The Atlantic. She was a 2021 Video Consortium mentor, a 2019 Points North Fellow, a 2017-2018 UnionDocs Collaborative Studio fellow, and a 2023 Sundance Producer Lab fellow.
- Untitled Policing Documentary (wt)
About the Project
Untitled Policing Documentary is a film like no other, an explosive confessional told from behind the thin blue line, it examines police crime and the personal and political consequences of law enforcement wrongdoing on officers and their victims.
Project Team
Charles Burnett
A MacArthur grant recipient and a Guggenheim Fellow, Charles Burnett’s body of work is recognized with an honorary Academy Award. His films include The Glass Shield, a groundbreaking narrative on police corruption and violence, My Brother’s Wedding, the classic Library of Congress National Film Registry selections Killer of Sheep (among the registry’s first 50 films) and To Sleep With Anger (starring Danny Glover). Burnett’s nonfiction work includes The Blues, produced by Martin Scorsese, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, and the recent PBS documentary Power To Heal, on the painful and death-riddled history of segregation at southern U.S. Hospitals.
Nicole Lucas Haimes
Nicole Lucas Haimes is an award-winning documentary filmmaker known for her richly observed character portrayals and incisive exploration of little-known worlds. Her television credits include CBS, BET, and the ABC News flagship documentary series, Turning Point. For PBS, Haimes produced and directed the Emmy-nominated Cracking The Code. She directed and Co-Executive Produced for A&E, Confessions of the DC Sniper, featuring the first exclusive interview with Lee Boyd Malvo. Her feature documentaries include the New York Times Critic pick Chicken People, which opened at SXSW before its 2016 theatrical release. It received nominations for SXSW’s Gamechanger Award and Nashville’s Grand Jury prize. Her critically acclaimed film, The Good, The Bad, The Hungry, for ESPN Films 30 for 30, premiered at Tribeca in 2019. Her most recent effort, the doc short Outsider which she produced, will premiere at Montclair Film Festival 2023.
Nicole’s investigation, Who Killed Julian Pierce? for Mel magazine, was selected as a Notable Narrative by the Neiman Storyboard and a Longform top ten crime article for 2017.
- When They Were Here
About the Project
When They Were Here is a documentary about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls crisis on the Blackfeet Reservation in northern Montana, told through the eyes of the families and community members left behind. The film traces experiences through time, place, and memory–and examines the legacy of violence in the place they call home.
Project Team
Ivan MacDonald
Ivan MacDonald is a member of the Blackfeet tribe and an Emmy-winning filmmaker. His most recent producing project, Murder in Bighorn, premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and aired nationally on Showtime. He is an inaugural fellow for the Netflix and Illuminative Producers fellowship and is an alumnus of the Firelight Media Documentary Film Lab. Currently, he is the recipient of the Hulu and Firelight Kindling fund and developing a film about the history of indigenous residential schools told through the lens of technology. His work has been supported by Sundance, ITVS, and the Montana Film Office.
Ivy MacDonald
Ivy MacDonald is an Emmy-winning filmmaker and member of the Blackfeet Tribe. Her most recent producing project, Murder in Bighorn, premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and aired nationally on Showtime. She is currently directing and producing two feature-length documentaries about her community, the Blackfeet Tribe. Her work has been supported by Sundance, ITVS, and the Montana Film Office.
Mridu Chandra
Mridu Chandra is a BAFTA and Emmy-nominated filmmaker based in New York City. She has over 20 years of experience as a creative producer of impactful documentaries and fiction films that cover topics of civil rights, environmental and racial justice, LGBTQ+ history, and gender equality. Her films have premiered at Sundance, Telluride, and SXSW; aired on PBS, Disney+, and on Netflix; and screened for members of U.S. Congress and the United Nations. Most recently, she produced Becoming Cousteau (BAFTA nominated for Best Documentary) for two-time Oscar nominee Liz Garbus and co-produced Cured (Emmy nominated for Best Research). In addition to her filmmaking practice, she is a committed field-builder and educator. From 2016 to 2019, she was the founding director of IF/Then Shorts– a film fund and distribution initiative supporting the professional development and increased visibility of underrepresented filmmakers across the U.S. and worldwide.