Still not sure if you're eligible? Take a look at our FAQ page.

This year, in a continued effort to standardize the application process for filmmakers who may be applying to multiple funds, LEF has used the latest Nonfiction Core Application as a template to update the Moving Image Fund LOI and Full Application forms. The LEF letter of inquiry form now includes an additional 2022 question drawn from the updated Nonfiction Core Application and clarifying language about existing LEF questions. The MIF full application will further reflect updated and added questions, for which you can get an initial sense by visiting the Nonfiction Core Application website.

Submitting a MIF letter of inquiry is also an opportunity to express interest in being considered for the Harvard FSC-LEF Fellowship, an opportunity for Boston-area filmmakers to receive a jointly-funded $10,000 grant, access to FSC’s pool of production and post-production equipment, and participation in the Harvard FSC community through work-in-progress screenings, workshops, and other activities.

The Media Fund is PIC's longest standing funding initiative, which provides funds for single non-fiction projects of half an hour or an hour in length about the indigenous Pacific Islander experience, in production or post-production. Projects applying to the Media Fund must be intended for national public television broadcast, and therefore must be able to enter into a production agreement. 

The Big Sky Pitch is an opportunity for filmmaking teams to "pitch" their documentary work-in-progress to a panel of the top commissioning editors and funders for documentary film. Documentary features of all forms and subjects are eligible to submit. A maximum of 10 projects are accepted to pitch in this session.

A virtual info session will be held at 1pm on December 13.

Earlier this month, MIT Press released Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media for Equity and Justice, a coauthored investigation into the ways co-creation methods contain the potential for more ethical media production as well as challenges to how makers approach storytelling, knowledge formation, and even perceptions of time. Much of the work in this book is reflected in an existing online publication, Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating within Communities, across Disciplines, and with Algorithms, a field study with roots in the MIT Open Doc Lab that sees a coalescing around expanding ideas of co-creation by an assortment of documentarians, journalists, artists, designers, media scholars, and researchers.

One of the imperatives of the study is to explore alternatives to individual creative authorship, something particularly prevalent in the field of nonfiction filmmaking. A Eurocentric methodology of media production has prioritized "top-down production, meaning-making, and media that privilege the idea of a singular author, and by extension a singular authority." In an attempt to understand and propose solutions to the often harmful practices this type of system engenders, the coauthors have constructed an interdisciplinary analysis of the varied fruits and pitfalls of co-creation with the online, seven-part Collective Wisdom, which is open for community review and discussion. "In co-creation," the field study reports, "projects emerge from a process, and evolve from within communities and with people, rather than for or about them."