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.

Since its inception, the Production Assistance Program has helped in the completion of hundreds of projects, including Oscar-winning documentary CITIZENFOUR, directed 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.   The program has also supported critically-acclaimed fiction features like Dee Rees’ PARIAH,   I CARRY YOU WITH ME (dir. Heidi Ewing, prod. Mynette Louie) and FAREWELL AMOR (dir. Ekwa Msangi, prod. Huriyyah Muhammad, Sam Bisbee, Josh Penn),    We’re thrilled to have had 14 films in total from WMM current and alum filmmakers premiering at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival including opening night film  ITS ONLY LIFE AFTER ALL (dir Alexandria Bombach),  GOING TO MARS: THE NIKKI GIOVANNI PROJECT (Dir Michèle Stephenson),  MILITHUSANDO (dir Milisuthando Bongela,  LITTLE RICHARD: I AM EVERYTHING (dir Lisa Cortés.   In addition to Sundance, films supported by our program premiere at major festivals like Berlin, Tribeca, IDFA, and SXSW.  Films and filmmakers we have supported have been nominated for or won Academy Awards for the last 17 years, including last year’s nominee for Best Documentary Short, THE MARTHA MITCHELL EFFECT. 

In the last 5 years, WMM’s Production Assistance 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.  Since its inception, the program has been a part of raising almost $100,000,000 and helping more than 1000 films to completion.

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Sundays at Café Tabac

Enter the world of radical glamour, "Sundays at Café Tabac" chronicles the title’s legendary lesbian night in NY’s East Village(1993-95), whose showcase of diversity and bold self-expression changed lives and mirrored unprecedented visibility that rocked the mainstream media, in an era when visibility was a matter of life and death.
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On Three Wheels

On Three Wheels is a documentary feature that portrays the ups and downs of families raising children with disabilities through the eyes of Sandra and the work she does with her Brooklyn-based non-profit, committed to providing them with pro-bono adaptive tricycles that equip them for the ride of their lives.
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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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Aftermath

AFTERMATH revisits the wrenching, highly-publicized hate crime documented in Emmy-nominated THE BRANDON TEENA STORY, 25 years later. Through the eyes of a community grappling with the impact of Brandon’s life and death, the film explores loss, growth and life for LGBTQ individuals in Heartland America.
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The Unfixing

What begins as an intimate journey, grappling with life and death, evolves into an epic quest of environmental proportions. This captivating odyssey intertwines six decades of family archive, verité moments, and meticulously-crafted animation. In a remarkable twist, illness becomes an invitation to understand the environmental crisis from new perspective.
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Little Sallie Walker

As Black women from across the generations make their way through a less than idyllic America, they contemplate how the childhood play that once served as their lifeline might be magical enough to liberate and heal them now.
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River of Grass

A time-traveling guide channeled by the land recounts the Everglades’ violent past and warns of Florida's precarious future. Told through Miami journalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas's The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), the film explores how Florida’s vulnerability to climate change is historically rooted in the Everglades’ ongoing legacies of settler colonialism.
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Personal Statement

Three seniors at Brooklyn high schools are determined to get their entire classes to college, even though they aren't even sure they are going to make it there themselves.
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The Long View

One community's struggle to create schools that work for all its students.
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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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The Place That Makes Us

Among the abandoned industrial ruins of Ohio, a new generation is determined to rebuild home.
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Mama: Black Motherhood in Crisis

Set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and the reckoning of systemic racism in America, Mama is a powerful, intimate documentary about the multi-pronged threats facing Black mothers, and the effects of racism on their health and their children.
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Postmortem

POSTMORTEM is a documentary feature that is at once personal memoir, true crime, and cultural interrogation. Filming the behind-the-scenes experience of staging the POSTMORTEM play, we expose another layer: the true story beneath the art, and the ways rigorous artistic creation can reveal deeper, collective truths.
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Women In Blue

A high-profile police shooting rocks the Minneapolis Police Department, and its reform-minded first female chief is forced to resign. Following four women officers— who carry on the fight to transform the MPD and restore community trust—WOMEN IN BLUE explores gender, race and violence in American policing.
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Surf The Wild Woman

Surfing is the backdrop, strength is the journey.
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The Good Relative

THE GOOD RELATIVE is the story of Faith Spotted Eagle, an internationally renowned and revered elder of the Yankton Sioux Tribe in South Dakota, as she confronts the State of South Dakota to protect their tribal water rights.
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Lawrence Weiner: Writing on the Wall

Lawrence Weiner: Writing on the Wall is an intimate documentary film about the trailblazing artist Lawrence Weiner, who as one of the founders of Conceptual Art helped to revolutionize and democratize the art world in the 1960s by taking his artwork out of the galleries and into the streets.
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