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
Good Fire
After more than one hundred years of fire suppression, Yurok people are returning Indigenous fire medicine to the land in order to heal the world.
Learn more
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?
Learn more
ARTIFACTS
The life of a successful yet isolated photographer changes as she learns how to cope with a rare visual disease.
Learn more
Karuara, People of the River
A film about spiritual beings that live in the Amazons’ rivers, and an indigenous community’s struggle to save these sacred water guardians.
Learn more
And Then One Day…
When a novel reveals her Jewish cattle-trading family didn’t leave Germany by choice but by coercion, Carole travels to her family’s town. There, she collaborates with high school students, uncovering in local archives how brutality takes hold, law by law, echoing patterns that are unfolding again in our own time.
Learn more
No Money No Honey
Revisiting memories captured on old VHS tapes, Máxima, an Argentine sex worker, longs for her golden years in Miami with friends while confronting the ghosts of a childhood scarred by neglect and abuse. As she reconciles with her past, she finds strength in the needs of her trans community.
Learn more
Cancer: A Love Story (Working Title)
Cancer: A Love Story is an autobiographical documentary about my battle with cancer, confronting sexual assault, and the crazy things I did to heal myself. It’s a survival story, but also a story of mothers and daughters, and the intimacies of women’s bodies.
Learn more
Girl Island: The Sandy Stone Story
How does a nice, quiet Jewish boy born in New Jersey in 1936 become a sound engineer for Jimi Hendrix, a lesbian separatist, the founder of Trans Studies, and the Goddess of Cyberspace?
Learn more
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.
Learn more
A Woman on the Outside
After watching nearly every man in her life disappear into prison, Kristal Bush channels her struggle into reuniting other Philadelphia families divided by incarceration. But when her father and brother come home after decades behind bars, she confronts the greatest challenge yet—can she unite her own family without losing herself?
Learn more
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.
Learn more
Sterilized
Sterilized follows the journeys of young women who have made a radical decision - to remove their tubes so they can never have children. The film explores autonomy, fear, and who gets to decide what a woman’s life should look like.
Learn more
AKA Doris Wishman
In a world dominated by male filmmakers, delve into the enigmatic journey of a trailblazing American woman who redefined cinema through her groundbreaking contributions to the realm of sexploitation films.
Learn more
How to Die
Faced with the uncertainty of their final days, three hospice patients step into the unknown—preparing for a profound journey with psilocybin-assisted therapy. Blending documentary, animation, and archive, How to Die is a poetic meditation on living and dying.
Learn more
Untitled Kenyan Politics Project
At a moment of historical transformation for Kenya’s ancient Lamu archipelago, the race for Governor has become a battle of extremely high-stakes. Amidst waves of violent terror attacks, billion dollar infrastructure projects, ethnic tensions and an open hostility towards female leadership, the winner will set this sleepy historical fishing village onto a trajectory that could make or break the community forever.
Learn more
Terracotta Daughters
Terracotta Daughters is a feature-length documentary following eight Chinese girls from 2015 to 2030, whose portraits inspired Prune Nourry’s 2012 art installation of 108 sculptures modeled on the Terracotta Army of Xian. At once intimate and political, the film captures their journey from childhood to adulthood.
Learn more