While fiscal sponsorship is a component of the program, unlike other sponsoring organizations, we also provide a suite of support services such as tailored consultations, discounts to our workshops and webinars with leading industry professionals, and other essential resources.
In the last 5 years, WMM’s Production Assistance Program has helped 194 films reach completion and assisted filmmakers in raising more than $46,000,000 from government, foundation, corporate or individual, and crowd-funded sources. Since its inception, the program has been a part of raising more than $100,000,000 and helping more than 1,000 films to completion.
Films and filmmakers we have supported have been nominated for or won Academy Awards for the last 22 years, including Oscar-winning documentary CITIZENFOUR by Laura Poitras, STRONG ISLAND by Yance Ford, SUGARCANE by Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat, TO KILL A TIGER by Nisha Pahuja, THE ETERNAL MEMORY by Maite Alberdi and THE BARBER OF LITTLE ROCK by John Hoffman and Christine Turner, the last two of which were directed by PA alum. The program has also supported critically acclaimed fiction features like FAMILIAR TOUCH (dir. Sarah Friedland), Dee Rees’ PARIAH, I CARRY YOU WITH ME (dir. Heidi Ewing, prod. Mynette Louie), FAREWELL AMOR (dir. Ekwa Msangi, prod. Huriyyah Muhammad, Sam Bisbee, Josh Penn), and THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL (dir. Marielle Heller). We’re thrilled to continue to have a large presence at the Sundance Film Festival, including GOING TO MARS: THE NIKKI GIOVANNI PROJECT (Dir Michèle Stephenson), LITTLE RICHARD: I AM EVERYTHING (dir. Lisa Cortés), Sandi Tan’s SHIRKERS, which won the World Cinema Documentary Competition Award for Best Directing, and most recently SEEDS (dir. Brittany Shyne, prod. Danielle Varga), which won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize for Documentary. In addition to Sundance, films supported by our program premiere at major festivals like Berlin, Tribeca, CPH:DOX, and SXSW.
FIND PROJECTS AND FILMMAKERS TO SUPPORT
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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Traces of Brilliant Spirit
The country was occupied; revolution was brewing - three women’s lives converge as they step into history and ignite a movement. A century later, a Korean artist digs into the past, to uncover their forgotten stories and confront a nation’s legacy of silence.
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Being Olimpia
After creating a groundbreaking law against cyberviolence, Olimpia wages an internal battle to heal her wounds and reclaim her name.
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Hollywood Does Abortion
HOLLYWOOD DOES ABORTION reveals how depictions of abortion in film and television have both reflected and distorted this safe but controversial medical procedure. Exploring how abortion came into our living rooms and psyches, we see how these stories helped shape public discourse and today’s seismic shift in abortion access.
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Presente!
Five years after the assassination of Marielle Franco, a young community leader born in the favela of Rocinha, Magda Gomes, follows the journeys of Black women in Brazilian politics as she contemplates which path to take toward her future.
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See the Women
The daughter of an influential Native American activist raised in the center of the indigenous, political movement of the 70s, reclaims her identity as an activist and Indigenous woman by addressing the trauma that many women and children face, the one blind spot in her father’s own activism.
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The Road to Independence (Working Title)
Seeking to give a nuanced and humanized view of the Vietnam-American war and its complex reverberations, this documentary explores the perspective of Vietnamese youth and Communist veterans as they discuss the past and their dreams for Vietnam's future.
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First We Bombed New Mexico
75 years after the world's first nuclear bomb - codename Trinity - is secretly detonated in southern New Mexico, a Latina cancer survivor catalyzes a movement demanding justice for a legacy of lethal radiation.
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Into The Underworld
On a remote Indonesian island, a female-led underwater cave diving team joins forces with local scientists on an expedition to locate a desperately needed drinking water source for indigenous villages, and to protect their ancestral waters from encroaching threats of mining and climate change.
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SORORITY STORY
SORORITY STORY tells the unexamined story of racial discrimination in one of the largest and most exclusive private clubs in America: white college sororities.
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Will They Ever Come Back?
Driving down a long Colombian road, Angela and her sister enter the indigenous land where their father, an Afro-descendant farmer, was forcibly disappeared years ago. In a dream, he asks to be found. The journey confronts them with mysticism and a violated community that resists.
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As Prescribed
“Benzo warriors” fight a grassroots battle to save others from the devastating consequences of the little pill they took as prescribed.
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Ana Mendieta: Rebel by Nature
An intimate look at artist, Ana Mendieta, whose exile from her homeland Cuba inspired her pioneering art in the landscape. Family and friends speak out after more than 30 years, interwoven with newly discovered audio of the artist alongside her visually captivating Super 8 films.
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4 AM (working title)
A New York artist’s desperate life is shattered and rebuilt in a raw, cinematic odyssey, fusing avant-garde dance, verité documentary, and magical realism into a pulsing testament to the city’s creative soul.
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Hear, Eat, Home
A lyric portrait of how—through art, friendship, music, and food—New York immigrant musicians and artists understand the upheavals they faced in their home countries and answer new challenges that emerge as they make the US their home.
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The Coma Club
THE COMA CLUB follows four matriarchs as their loved ones emerge from comas caused by injuries sustained during America's recent wars. Moving between an annual retreat and their lives back home, the film offers a rare, intimate portrait of caregiving and the resilience of families living in combat’s long shadow.
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256,000 Miles From Home
On July 1, 2019, four former unaccompanied child refugees, now between 83 and 92 years old, arrive in Vienna, Austria, to begin a trip retracing the route they took 80 years ago, as Kindertransport children, traveling alone, without parents, fleeing to save their lives.
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8x10
8x10: From The Confines of Solitary To The Front Lines of Criminal Justice Reform is the story of one man’s experience with solitary confinement and his journey to change a system bent on destroying his humanity.
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