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
Flashing
How women around the world experience and address menopause - a critical and understudied realm of women's sexual health and reproduction.
Learn more
Sundays at Café Tabac
Step into the electrifying realm of radical glamour, where Sundays at Café Tabac immortalizes the iconic lesbian night that lit up New York’s East Village from 1993 to 1995. A vibrant celebration of diversity and unapologetic self-expression, this unforgettable gathering not only transformed lives but also mirrored the surge of visibility that sent shockwaves through mainstream media—during a time when being seen was a matter of survival.
Learn more
KILLFACE
KILLFACE (USA, 16 min) is a sensory, sound-centric meditation on female strength, stamina, and struggle through the visual metaphor of a female fighter.
Learn more
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.
Learn more
A Mother Apart (formerly MITM)
A Mother Apart (formerly MITM) is part mother-daughter buddy film, part investigative saga that follows Brooklyn's most outspoken poet-activist Staceyann Chin, as she navigates being a mom while discovering the truth about her own mother who abandoned her as an infant.
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
Barbara Forever
BARBARA FOREVER is an exclusive look at the iconic life, work, & legacy of pioneering lesbian experimental filmmaker, Barbara Hammer, tracing her prolific canon alongside never-before-seen documentations of her life and body, to reveal Hammer's unconventional attempts to live on forever.
Learn more
Kokusekihou (working title)
A Japanese-born woman lost her Japanese citizenship after naturalizing in the United States. Stranded in Japan during the COVID-19 border closures, she finds herself living in legal limbo and launches a constitutional challenge against Japan’s nationality law and its single-citizenship principle.
Learn more
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.
Learn more
#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.
Learn more
And Then One Day… (formerly SOMETHING REMAINS)
After uncovering her Jewish family’s names in a German novel, a filmmaker returns to her ancestral rural town. Immersed with contemporary high school students, she discovers how Nazi-era laws erased lives who thrived there for generations—exposing how nations collapse not always in chaos, but through silence and compliance.
Learn more
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.
Learn more
Seeing Stars
In this genre bending solo musical film, a legally blind writer waits in her eye Doctor’s office suspecting her low but long stable vision may be changing. Fighting fear, she inhabits her own stories of women with limited sight and limitless vision, turning them into stars to light her way.
Learn more
Acting Like Women
In 1973, women artists flocked to the Woman’s Building in L.A. – a birthplace for innovative, fearless, and still-relevant feminist performance art that laid a foundation for today’s art and social justice movements. ACTING LIKE WOMEN is a journey into art, activism, and gender told by those who lived it.
Learn more
Standing Above the Clouds
When the massive Thirty Meter Telescope is proposed to be built on Mauna Kea, an uprising of kiaʻi (protectors) in Hawaiʻi and around the world dedicate their lives to protecting the sacred mountain from destruction. Through the lens of mothers and daughters in three Native Hawaiian families, Standing Above the Clouds explores intergenerational healing and the impacts of safeguarding cultural traditions.
Learn more
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.
Learn more