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
Landscapes of Memory
Weaving personal essay and intimate character studies, LANDSCAPES OF MEMORY explores Germany’s remembrance culture, and the uses and abuses of collective memory.
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#WhileBlack
Witnesses who filmed the deaths of George Floyd, Philando Castile, and others, step forward in this ground-breaking documentary about the police brutality videos igniting global movements. Few realize how witnesses must battle online trolls, surveillance firms, and exploitative social media platforms turning their pain into profit.
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Adios Amor - The Search for Maria Moreno
The discovery of lost photographs sparks the search for a hero that history forgot—Maria Moreno, a migrant mother who sacrificed everything but her twelve kids for farmworker justice. The first female farmworker in the U.S. hired as a union organizer, Maria’s story was silenced and her legacy buried—until now.
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Postmortem
POSTMORTEM, a hybrid documentary film, is a boundary-pushing, family crime drama about an abused girl who didn’t tell her childhood secret—and the woman she becomes, who does.
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ithaka
This film is a project of Documentary Australia and is sponsored by Women Make Movies as part of our ongoing partnership in support of independent filmmakers.
The campaign to free Julian Assange takes on intimate dimensions in this documentary portrait of an father's fight to save his son.
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Bought/Broken
“Bought/Broken” is an interactive experience that examines the relationships and violence of abuse through the lens of objects bought, broken and repaired, evoking memories through objects and exploring the idea of gain and loss. I have been compositing the experiences and stories of domestic violence survivors.
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999: The Extraordinary Young Women on the First Official Transport to Auschwitz
“66% of millennials cannot say what Auschwitz was” even fewer know that the first Jewish transport to Auschwitz was 999 teenage girls and young women. Discover the truth behind this historical #MeToo moment and meet three survivors of the first transport, who are in their 90s, and their families.
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The Kids Are Not Alright
The Kids Are Not Alright is an intimate portrait of trauma following three families’ journeys as they work to shed light on the devastating impacts of the Troubled Teen Industry, pursue healing in the absence of justice, and fight to hold abusers accountable.
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MAILIN
Mailin tells her daughter a bedtime story, a metaphor unfolding the protagonists’ search to recover the memory of her past. Through a collage of archive and childhood drawings, emerges the story of a girl, who for 15 years suffered the abuses of a priest that Justice has just set free.
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Paper City
Paper City tells the story of three survivors of the 1945 fire-bombing of Tokyo as they launch one final campaign to leave behind a record of this forgotten tragedy—before the last of them passes away.
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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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A Place of Absence
Decades after the disappearance of her uncle during Argentina’s Dirty War, a filmmaker joins the Caravan of Mothers, a group of brave Central American women who embark on an annual bus trek through Mexico in desperate search of their children who disappeared trying to reach the US.
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LEE: We Are Our Times
Raised in a Lower East Side NYC project, Lee Quiñones’ urgency and need to express himself drove him to become one of the greatest artists to emerge from the 70s/80’s graffiti movement.
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Stand Up for Madinah
“STAND UP FOR MADINAH” follows the first female Muslim legislator in Delaware as she challenges the Biden administration on the ongoing war in Gaza. When she is not confronting the establishment, Madinah is spending time at comedy clubs trying her luck to find success as a local stand up comedian.
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Recovery City
Recovery City is an intimate, unflinching portrait of four bold women who refuse to let themselves or their community give in to the stigma and despair of addiction.
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Fire Tender
Yurok Tribal Members return fire to the land toward cultural and ecological healing.
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FLANA (formerly WOMEN OF MY LIFE)
Born in the home of a Baghdad midwife, director Zahraa is a witness to violence against women from girlhood. In a cinematic journey she interrogates the past in search of her missing friend and confronts lifelong fears and nightmares as she works with other women to imagine a better future.
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