The SFFILM Documentary Film Fund (DFF) supports engaging documentaries in post-production which exhibit compelling stories, intriguing characters, and an original, innovative visual approach. DFF grants are awarded once each year to documentary feature projects and are open to filmmakers internationally. As with all SFFILM grants, in addition to the cash awards, recipients will gain access to numerous benefits through the comprehensive and dynamic SFFILM Makers artist development program.

Regular deadline for applications in May 6th, 2022. Final deadline is May 20th, 2022. Learn more here.

Now in its 5th year, the LEF/CIFF Fellowship is an opportunity for 5 New England-based filmmaker teams to attend the 2022 Camden International Film Festival and connect with other filmmakers and industry leaders through a series of mentor-led project development workshops, networking events, and curated 1:1 meetings taking place both in-person during the festival and virtually in the weeks following.

Developed in partnership with LEF New England, whose goal is to fund the work of independent documentary film and video artists in the region and broaden recognition and support for their work, both locally and nationally.

Deadline to apply is May 9th, 2022. Learn more and apply here.

The Miller/Packan Film Fund supports documentaries that Educate, Inspire and Enrich. The fund is financed through the Rogovy Foundation. Each year, grants totaling $200,000 are awarded to between eight and twelve filmmakers. Each grant is one-time only and offered in amounts up to $25,000. At the highest level, the Fund's subject categories are Education, the Environment and Civics. Grants will be awarded to filmmakers who most closely match their defined areas of interest.

Deadline to apply is May 15th, 2022. Learn more here.

The Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film, now in its 4th year, is designed to provide finishing funds ($200,000), including outreach and marketing, for feature-length U.S. historical documentaries.

Deadline to apply is June 1st, 2022. Learn more here.

DETERMINED directed by Melissa Godoy and produced by Therese Barry-Tanner and Eileen Littig will have its broadcast premiere on PBS' NOVA on April 6, 2022. Three women at high risk for Alzheimer's disease offer their brains and bodies to a medical study. After the deaths of their mothers, these daughters are determined to contribute to the search for a cure. Meanwhile, they anxiously watch for signs of the disease in their own brains.

The film will stream until early May on NOVA's website.

BLACK MOTHERS LOVE & RESIST, directed by Débora Souza Silva, will have its premiere at the SFFILM Festival on April 29th at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco.

Wanda Johnson and Angela Williams, mothers of young Black men victimized by police brutality, come together and build a network of community-led support, mutual aid and healing in this trenchant documentary spanning Oakland's Fruitvale to the American South.

Get your tickets to the premiere here.

Firelight Media has announced their recipients of the Spark Fund, which offers support to established, independent documentary filmmakers who self-identify as Black, Indigenous, and/or people of color (BIPOC) and whose work on humanities-themed projects was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. This one-time opportunity, which is underwritten by the National Endowment for the Humanities' Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan Grantmaking initiative, provides stipends rather than project support to the filmmakers.

Recipients include CID filmmakers Débora Souza Silva (BLACK MOTHERS LOVE & RESIST) and Kimberlee Bassford (I OF THE WATER.) Read the full list of recipients here.

IN PLAIN SIGHT, directed and produced by Sarah McClure and co-directed and produced by Jessie Deeter, is one of four films selected as a grant recipient by The Rogovy Foundation. The film was also one of four films selected to participate in the pitch forum, Athena Film Festival Works-In-Progress, and was one of twenty films selected as a finalist with ScreenCraft.

IN PLAIN SIGHT is the story of an Amish woman who breaks her silence and ignites a nationwide movement of Amish sexual assault survivors fighting for healing, justice and reform from a famously insular, religious community.

ENDURING DEMOCRACY: THE MONTEREY PETITION, a film by David Schendel, premiered on April 1st at the Cinequest Cinejoy virtual film festival. It will also be in competition for Best Documentary during the in-person Cinequest Film Festival August 16 - 29. The film was completed by generous funding from California Humanities and The California State Library Civil Liberties Grant.

Enduring Democracy: The Monterey Petition tells the story of a group of women activists who combatted Asian hate crimes and resisted racism in war-torn 1940s California.

ONE ANOTHER, directed by Amber Love and produced by Elivia Shaw, has been selected as one of six projects to take part in Kartemquin Film's 2022 Diverse Voices in Docs (DVID) program. Over the course of six months, the film will receive mentorship and development from award-winning filmmakers and Kartemquin's wider community, culminating in a pitch to major industry funders in the fall. Read the full press release here.

CURED, an award-winning PBS documentary by Patrick Sammon and Bennett Singer, is a finalist for the 2022 National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) Television and Radio Journalism Award. The NIHCM Foundation selected entries that “highlight journalists’ growing commitment to community-focused reporting,

combating misinformation, and increasing understanding of the multifaceted health questions of our time.” The nominees for this $20,000 award will be honored in May at a ceremony at the Smithsonian Museum’s National Portrait Gallery. More info available here.

DO I NEED THIS? a film by Kate Schermerhorn will have a preview screening on the opening night of the Green Film Festival of San Francisco, April 14th at 8pm at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. The film will be paired with THE NEW ENVIRONMENTALISTS, a film by Mill Valley Film Group.

DO I NEED THIS? is a documentary film about American excess, and the stuff from which happiness is truly made.

THREE OCEAN ADVOCATES, an Emmy award-winning film directed and produced by Andrea E. Leland and Cynthia Abbott, has been accepted into New Day Films. Recent and upcoming screenings of the film include:

Screening and panel discussion took place at the DC Environmental Film Festival. The discussion included scientist Caroline Rodgers, who is a Coral Reef Specialist and Marine Ecologist with the Wetland and Aquatic Research Center in St. John, US Virgin Islands.

A DECENT HOME, a film directed by Sara Terry and produced by Sara Terry, Alysa Nahmias and Sara Archambault, is launching its year-long impact campaign in Iowa with three screenings across the state in April: the Julien Dubuque International Film Festival, April 20-24; a special screening at Drake University Law School in Des Moines on April 26; and a screening at FilmScene in Iowa City on April 28.

A Decent Home will also be screening at RiverRun International Film Festival in North Carolina, April 21-30.

DIAMOND DIPLOMACY brings you #150Stories, a year-long social media project celebrating the 150th anniversary of the arrival of baseball in Japan. We will be posting 150 stories about baseball legends and key figures in U.S.-Japan baseball history throughout the year.

Diamond Diplomacy has the unique opportunity to lead such a celebratory campaign with a wealth of stories of the 150 years of baseball in Japan, and of U.S.-Japan diplomacy through baseball. The film has a great deal of access to interviews conducted with legendary figures in U.S.-Japan baseball, archival materials, such as from Major League Baseball and the National Archives. As such, the #150Stories campaign gives a further platform to tell stories that may not fit in the limits of the feature-length documentary film. It is also open to public submissions and content collaborations. Check out #150Stories and their upcoming expanded launch on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

The Woodstock Film Festival (WFF) has announced its second annual four week Filmmakers Residency/Incubator. The Residency will run during May 2022 and will host four emerging filmmakers.

These include CID sponsored filmmaker Natalie Zimmerman. Natalie's film, OCEANIA, is a documentary centered on the island nation of Kiribati, which is predicted to be uninhabitable by the year 2030 due to rising sea levels brought by climate change.

NOWHERE TO FALL, directed by Palu Abadia, was awarded with one post production grant from the CDF, Colombian Development Fund, and was also selected by The DOCULAB - Guadalajara International Film Festival to receive two awards for post production, one for colorization and another for sound mix. The film was also selected by DOCO, partner of Doc Society, for work on its social impact strategy. The filmmakers want to bring this film to the Colombian communities who received them with open arms and shared their history with them (more to come).

Earlier this year, THE G WORD and Families For San Francisco partnered with California Association for the Gifted to present a timely webinar conversation that centered the voices of two of the top gifted education and equity scholars in the nation: Dr. Joy Lawson Davis and Dr. Donna Y. Ford. As part of the film's large impact enterprise, the discussion, free and open to all, presented a rare opportunity to look at the common issues affecting gifted and special education in districts across the nation through a hyperlocal perspective. Watch the full replay via Vimeo. And ICYMI, last year THE G WORD team launched its very first Gifted/Talented/Neurodiverse Awareness Week with help from 20 co-sponsors and 54 panelists. Over 2100 registrants in 16+ countries enjoyed a full week of programming, including six webinars and seven podcasts featuring director/producer, Marc Smolowitz,. Access the full archive here and save the dates for G/T/N Awareness Week 2022, happening October 24-28th.

STRANGERS TO PEACE, directed by Laura Angel Rengifo and Noah DeBonis, was selected as First Runner Up for the Documentary Achievement Award at the Miami Film Festival.

Strangers to Peace captures the personal stories of three former child soldiers who, after a lifetime of war, abandon Colombia's FARC guerrilla army. They now face anxiety and danger as they attempt to rebuild their lives in a homeland that sees them as terrorists.

Upstander Project invites you to join them at the Old South Meeting House in Boston on Tuesday evening, April 12 for the in-person premiere of Bounty, co-presented by Upstander Project and Revolutionary Spaces. Registration is free!

Bounty reveals the hidden story of the Phips Proclamation, one of scores of scalp-bounty proclamations issued by colonial authorities to exterminate Native people in order to take their land in what is now New England. In the film, Penobscot parents and children defy erasure and commemorate survival by reading and reacting to the 1755 Phips Proclamation’s call for colonial settlers to hunt, scalp, and murder Penobscot people. 

WHAT: Watch Bounty and then join Penobscot Nation Tribal Ambassador and Bounty filmmaker Maulian Dana, Bounty filmmaker Dawn Neptune Adams (Penobscot), Bounty senior advisor Chris Newell, Upstander Project learning director Mishy Lesser, and Upstander Project director and Bounty filmmaker Adam Mazo along with special guests from Revolutionary Spaces for a conversation after the film. A reception will follow the panel discussion. 

WHEN: April 12, 2022 at 7:00 p.m. ET

WHERE: Old South Meeting House, Boston, Massachusetts

Register here.

A film that CID filmmaker Jon Crawford workshopped at a previous CID Kopkind Film Camp, is now a series on HBO. THE INVISIBLE PILOT tells the story of a charismatic, daredevil husband and father who unexpectedly jumped off a bridge in 1977, despite a seemingly happy home life and lucrative career as a pilot.

The three-part series launches on April 4th and is directed by Phil Lott and Ari Mark, and executive produced by Adam McKay, Todd Schulman, Craig Hodges, Jon Crawford, and Nancy Abraham and Lisa Heller for HBO.

Ken Paul Rosenthal discusses the roots and creative process of his film JULIA VINOGRAD: BETWEEN SPIRIT AND STONE in the new issue of Poesy Magazine, here. He welcomed ten new literary organizations to the project's Partners page. Ken will present an excerpt from the in-progress documentary and readings of Vinograd's poetry at the first annual Hayward Literary Festival. Read Julia's Pushcart Prize-winning poem, 'For the Young Men Who Died of Aids' here.

Eight of Peter Friedman's films have been acquired by Ovid and Docuseek. Friedman's Strange Attractions produces non-fiction films on diverse subjects from portraits of extraordinary people, to films covering LGBTQIA+ issues, to contemporary biology. Films include Roy Smeck: Wizard of the Strings, Silverlake Life, Death by Design: Where Parallel Worlds Meet, The Life and Time of Life and Times, The Devil is in the Detail.

Filmmaking Fundamentals starts 6/6

Storytelling Workshop starts 6/8

Contact Michael Sheridan with any questions, michael@sheridanworks.com, 857-415-0564

This six-session [Camera Work and Visual Storytelling] workshop was one of my best-ever learning experiences. It opened up a whole new artistic discipline and effectively combined the aesthetic and technical aspects of visual storytelling. – Melissa Shaak

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