Since its inception, the Production Assistance Program has assisted in the completion of hundreds of projects, including Oscar-winning documentary CITIZENFOUR by Laura Poitras, Oscar nominee STRONG ISLAND by Yance Ford, and Sandi Tan’s SHIRKERS, which won the World Cinema Documentary Competition Award for Best Directing at Sundance in 2018. In the last 5 years, WMM’s PA Program has helped 136 films reach completion and assisted filmmakers in raising more than $28,000,000 from government, foundation, corporate or individual, and crowd-funded sources.
Below you can browse, learn more about, and support select films fiscally sponsored through our Production Assistance Program. You can take part in helping women’s visions reach the screen by making a tax-deductible donation to any of the projects featured here. With your help, we can continue to see advancements in feminist filmmaking every day. Hopefully, with our collective efforts to support these artists, more opportunities and celebrated accomplishments will continue to flourish.
FIND PROJECTS AND FILMMAKERS TO SUPPORT
As Slow As Possible
From the unhurried movements of Icelandic glaciers to a 639 year-long musical performance in Germany, stories of geological, human, and cosmic time intersect in a cinematic exploration of time and timelessness.
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The Portal
A documentary and book with a global vision to shift humanity out of a state of crisis. The Portal follows six real-life stories that all overcome trauma, anxiety, depression and PTSD using a simple yet powerful technique. What does the planet look like if we all did this?
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Seams
A filmmaker’s parachute obsession begins a journey investigating Irish and Northern Irish women’s labor during the Second World War. Animations interweave with women’s testimonies of divisions in neutral Ireland, partitioned Northern Ireland, and war-torn Britain. Questioning ‘enemy’, nationalism and colonialism, Seams also celebrates women and their culture’s movement toward peace.
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Family Treasures Lost and Found
Journalist Karen A. Frenkel is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her mother spoke of her wartime ordeal, but her father was silent. Karen embarked on a five-year quest to fill in the gaps, honor her parents and lost relatives, and ensure that memories would endure. This became an exciting detective story as she searched online and real-world archives and visited cities to better understand silence and loss.
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Every Day Is a Holiday
A war veteran and P.O.W. takes a complicated path to U.S. citizenship, made more dramatic by his daughter's discovery of his wartime diary.
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On The Divide
ON THE DIVIDE follows the story of three Latinx people living in McAllen, Texas who, despite their views, are connected by the most unexpected of places: the last abortion clinic on the U.S./Mexico border. As threats to the clinic and their personal safety mount, these three are forced to make decisions they never could have imagined.
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The Gas Station Attendant
Telephone conversations the filmmaker recorded with her father while he worked nights at a gas station reveal a remarkable journey, from living on the streets of India to a chance encounter that would bring him to the United States.
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The Mask That Grins And Lies
The Mask that Grins and Lies is a meditative documentary feature that uncovers the intergenerational silence shrouding black women’s mental illness.
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Send Us Your Brother
Send Us Your Brother is a feature-length documentary about Masculinity. Filmed over two and a half years, the documentary is a rich, and deeply intimate look at what it means to be male in India today.
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The Feeling of Being Watched
When journalist Assia Boundaoui investigates rumors of surveillance in her Arab-American neighborhood in Chicago, she uncovers one of the largest FBI terrorism probes conducted before 9/11 and reveals its enduring impact on the community.
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Changing By The Minute
One year in a startlingly upbeat New York City public middle school that mixes 10-14-year-olds in almost all their classes — and somehow it actually works.
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ARTIFACTS
The life of a successful yet isolated photographer changes as she learns how to cope with a rare visual disease.
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Sleep Training
When a new parent’s postpartum depression devolves into frightening hallucinations, an escape from motherhood is necessary to stay sane –but is abandoning the baby the only way out?
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Coded Bias
Merging cinema vérité and graphic visual elements, the film captures MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini’s startling discovery that most facial recognition software does not accurately see dark-skinned faces. Through Joy’s transformation from scientist to tireless advocate, Coded Bias sheds light on the impacts of AI on civil rights.
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Jennifer, 42
Based on a real case, JENNIFER, 42 tells the harrowing true story of the life and murder of Jennifer Magnano. Voiced by her three children, and told through animation, JENNIFER, 42 reveals the true nature of domestic violence and a woman's life and death battle for freedom.
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DAY OF A STRANGER
DAY OF A STRANGER is a short film about Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, one of the most influential spiritual writers of the twentieth century. Through rare audio recordings, this film explores the final years of Merton’s life from 1965-1968, when he lived as a hermit in the Kentucky woods.
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WOMEN OF STEEL
1980-1994: hundreds of migrant/working-class women campaigned for equality against BHP, the biggest and most powerful company in Australia. In WOMEN OF STEEL, these ordinary women tell their personal stories of how they beat a giant and changed the workplace rules for women and men throughout the country.
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