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
From Here
Set in Berlin and New York, FROM HERE is a hopeful story of four young artists and activists from immigrant families redefining belonging in an era of rising nationalism globally.
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East of Town
In the Deep South, the lives of an immigration attorney, a community, and a family intertwine in the shadow of one of the largest immigration detention prisons in the United States.
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Eat Bitter
Against the backdrop of civil war in the poverty-stricken Central African Republic, a Chinese construction manager and a local African laborer work on opposite ends of the spectrum to construct a sparkling new bank. As deadlines loom, unexpected twists threaten their jobs, relationships, and plans for a better life.
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Smile4Kime
A grieving young filmmaker struggling with mental illness communes with the spirit of her vibrant friend with whom she shared an unbreakable bond to discover how even beyond death, their friendship lives on.
Smile4Kime is an experimental and autoethnographic documentary that uses animation to tell a story of friendship.
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Milisuthando
‘Milisuthando’ is a coming-of-age personal essay film on love and what it means to be human in the context of race, explored through the memories of Milisuthando – who grew up during apartheid but didn’t know it was happening until it was over.
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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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LIVING SOUND
LIVING SOUND is a documentary film that tells the never-before-told story of legendary record producer Ethel Gabriel, one of the earliest woman producers for a major record label. Beyond a typical historical retelling, LIVING SOUND navigates incomplete records/memory- relying on personal archives, oral histories, and music to explore myths and uncover truths.
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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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Beautiful Something Left Behind
When a child loses a parent, their world turns upside down. Death may come suddenly or slowly, violently or peacefully, but it leaves a pain that the child has never felt before. At Good Grief in New Jersey, groups of children come to understand how to live with their grief.
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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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The Park Film Project
A portrait of Prospect Park in Brooklyn New York, the film is an exploration of democracy and American identity today.
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Well Groomed
A year immersed in the visually stunning and humorous world of competitive creative dog grooming.
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SEEDS
SEEDS is an ethnographic portrait of a centennial African-American farm in Thomasville, Georgia. Using lyrical black and white imagery this meditative film examines the decline of generational black farmers and the significance of owning land.
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Feed Me A Story
Feed Me a Story is a transmedia project - film, interactive and performative - that embarks on a community-based multicultural journey through food. The project explores the concept of what it means to be an American and incorporates the quintessential American road trip with cultural history and contemporary influences.
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One Person, One Vote?
One Person, One Vote? is an illuminating documentary that examines the long and contentious history of the Electoral College and contemplates where our democracy goes from here — should one person equal one vote in America?
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Sundays at Café Tabac
"Sundays at Café Tabac" is the story of a weekly salon/evening in the East Village, NYC during the height of lesbian visibility between 1993-95, where a group of creative queer women expressed their individuality, sexuality, and fierceness through the community. Paving the way for the LGBTQI+ expressions we see today.
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