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Member Hours: Meet the Programmers of Getting Real '24

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  • Close up headshot of Meghan Monsour with long dark hair and fair skin.
    Meghan Monsour
  • A person sits in a director's chair at a festival, holding a microphone.
    Abby Sun
  • A light brown woman with glasses, medium length black hair, wearing a beige top in front of a bulletin board on a wall.
    Lisa Valencia-Svensson
Three people standing in a brightly lit room, attending Getting Real '22. (left to right) Man is wearing a black and gray shirt and olive green pants, man in middle is wearing a backpack with a gray shirt and black pants, and woman on the right is wearing a pink tank top dress with her brown hair clipped in the back.

Join us on Wednesday, February 14, at 10:00 am PT, for a conversation with this year’s Getting Real Programmers, Meghan Monsour and Lisa Valencia-Svensson, along with Getting Real and IDA’s Director of Artists Programs, Abby Sun, about Getting Real ‘24, their programming vision, and an early preview of this year’s conference. 

The biennial Getting Real conference is set to celebrate its tenth anniversary as North America’s largest peer-to-peer gathering of non-fiction filmmakers and practitioners in April 15-18, 2024, in person in Los Angeles and virtually worldvide. Getting Real has historically attracted major industry players, fostering face-to-face interactions between filmmakers and influential figures, including streaming platforms and funding agencies around a specific theme in each iteration. The conference is set up to foster a collaborative and interconnected community for documentary filmmakers and their audiences.

The theme for the 2024 conference is Transitions: Strategy, Networks, Access; emphasizing a holistic approach to the life cycle of documentaries, the conference aims to highlight the importance of filmmakers accessing institutions, people, spaces, and resources collectively. It addresses the challenges of limited resources within documentary filmmaking infrastructures and advocates for creating and sustaining networks that connect filmmakers across physical and digital boundaries. Learn more and purchase your pass here.

For access accommodations, please contact anisa@documentary.org so we can ensure that you can fully participate in the event.

Event Participants

    Close up headshot of Meghan Monsour with long dark hair and fair skin.

    Meghan Monsour

    Meghan Monsour is a film programmer and programming consultant based in Mexico. Her career has been dedicated to reimagining how films connect with their audiences and developing alternative distribution networks for documentary film. Previously she was the director of programming at the Ambulante Documentary Film Festival.

    A person sits in a director's chair at a festival, holding a microphone.

    Abby Sun

    Abby Sun (she/her) is IDA's Director of Artist Programs and Editor of Documentary magazine. Before joining IDA, Abby was the Curator of the DocYard and co-curated My Sight is Lined with Visions: 1990s Asian American Film & Video with Keisha Knight. As a graduate student researcher in the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Abby edited Immerse. She has bylines in Film Comment, Filmmaker Magazine, Film Quarterly, MUBI Notebook, Sight & Sound, and other publications. Abby has served on festival juries for festivals like Hot Docs, Dokufest, Palm Springs, and CAAMfest, as well as nominating committees for the Gotham Awards and Cinema Eye. Abby has reviewed projects for grants and markets such as IDFA Forum, BGDM, NEA, SFFILM, LEF Foundation, Sundance Catalyst, and spoken on and facilitated panels at Locarno, IFFR, TIFF, NYFF, and other film festivals. Along with Keisha, Abby received a fall 2022 Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship. She produced Shared Resources and, with Jordan Lord, received a 2022 American Stories Documentary Fellowship for the upcoming The Voice of Democracy. Her hometown is Columbia, Missouri, US.

    A light brown woman with glasses, medium length black hair, wearing a beige top in front of a bulletin board on a wall.

    Lisa Valencia-Svensson

    Lisa is an Emmy award-winning producer and Acting Industry Programs Director at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. She was previously Head of Operations at Multitude Films, where she co-produced Pray Away (Tribeca 2020), Call Center Blues (Academy Award Best Short Documentary shortlist 2021), and Always In Season (Sundance 2019, Independent Lens). She produced Call Her Ganda (Tribeca 2018, POV), which The Hollywood Reporter called “heartbreaking and inspirational.” Her first documentary Herman's House (Full Frame 2012, POV) won an Emmy for Outstanding Arts & Culture Programming. Her second feature Migrant Dreams (Hot Docs 2016, TVO) won the Canadian Hillman Prize and was a Top Ten Audience Favorite at Hot Docs. Other credits include The World Before Her (Tribeca 2012, POV) and Laila At the Bridge (CPH:DOX 2018).