Photo: _holdsyoutight__2_of_3

LOS ANGELES, California — On Sept. 24 Sundance Institute announced their 2025 Documentary Fund grant recipients including the inaugural cohort of Creative Spirit Fund grantees, who are independent women storytellers across the globe. The Documentary Fund supports global nonfiction storytelling on timely subjects that drive cultural and social impact.

32 projects across various stages of development are selected for grants

The 32 projects selected receive unrestricted grants from a total granting fund of over $1.5 million. Grants support projects at every stage of the filmmaking process with seven granted in development, 14 in production, ten in post-production, and one completed project in its impact campaign. The Documentary Fund is made possible by support from Open Society Foundations, John Templeton Foundation, Sandbox Films, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Free People, The Asian American Foundation (TAAF), The Charles Engelhard Foundation, Facet, Nion McEvoy & Leslie Berriman, Roger and Carin Ehrenberg, Adobe, Scott and Jennifer Frank, and Greg Sarris.

Nonfiction storytelling grants now include the New Voices Award

“Nonfiction storytelling at its best can cultivate a profound understanding of our shared humanity. We commend these artists for their mastery of the documentary form. We believe their work will foster open dialogue, inspire collective action, and deepen our comprehension of the complexities of today’s world. These projects, while showcasing a diverse array of artistic approaches, consistently demonstrate a transformative power to question, empower, and drive cultural and social change. We are grateful to our partners for enabling us to advocate for these vital narratives, which are poised to ignite significant global conversations for years to come.” — Paola Mottura, Director, Documentary Film Fund and Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs

Global distribution of awards

This year, 57% of grant proposals came from outside the U.S. — among international submissions, high interest came from Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Middle East and North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. The 32 projects receiving grants represent 24 countries, with 45% of grantees being first-time feature directors. Grantees also include directors whose previous movies have won awards at Sundance and other film festivals.

This year’s slate of nonfiction projects showcases compelling perspectives on identity and legacy, exploring how we navigate complex histories to forge new paths forward. Other project highlights include the resilience found in ancestral and chosen family support systems, often revealing tender reconnections and the healing of inherited wounds; long-term perspectives on social and political struggles, documenting, well after international press have left, grassroots movements and the fight against oppression; and the experiences of displaced and immigrant individuals, families, and communities in the United States and across the world and the universal search for belonging amid uncertain landscapes.

The 2025 Documentary Fund Grantees are:

DEVELOPMENT

Electric Waves (U.K., U.S.A.), Director: Natalie Cubides-Brady, Producer: Jacob Swan Hyam

Electric Waves is a kaleidoscopic hybrid documentary exploring the ocean as a site of mass communication, haunting, and time.

Everything Must Go (U.S.A.), Director-Producer: Mackie Mallison, Producers: Rita Walsh, Josh Peters, Isaac Ericson, Robina Riccitiello

A Japanese American family united by anxiety disorders and vivid daydreams struggles to let go of their dying matriarch.

Kampuchea (France, Cambodia), Director-Producer: Neary Adeline Hay

In Kampuchea, Neary Adeline Hay investigates her origins, shaped by the violence of the Khmer Rouge. Born of a forced “red marriage,” she investigates how trauma is passed from one generation to the next — across mind, body, and DNA — and reflects on the possibilities of healing and resilience.

Plastic Atlantis (Cabo Verde, Senegal, Brazil), Director: Samira Vera-Cruz, Producer: Pedro Soulé

A poetic journey by filmmaker and diver Samira Vera-Cruz into the Atlantic’s depths, tracing currents that link Senegal, Cabo Verde, and Brazil — slavery and capitalism, memory, and plastic — as she searches for the roots of her Creole identity and connection to nature.

The River (Myanmar, Thailand, Canada, Germany), Director-Producer: Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing, Producers: Bob Moore, Mila Aung-Thwin, Ulla Lehmann

The River chronicles the lives of displaced people in Myanmar, setting up new camps by themselves near the Thai border. The film exposes the struggles of a community forced to abandon their homes due to the relentless violence inflicted by the Myanmar military.

Untitled (U.S.A.), Directors-Producers: Giselle Bailey, Stephen Bailey

This time-bending hybrid feature blurs past and present as it unravels an unsolved mystery at the heart of America.

Untitled, Director: Pamella Edouard, Producers: Estelle Robin You, Zippy Nyaruri

A new feature documentary by Pamella Edouard.

PRODUCTION

*holds you tight* (U.S.A.), Director: Jane M. Wagner, Producers: Carrie Weprin, Joe Weil

A lonely night watchman develops a relationship with an AI chatbot, transforming his worldview and challenging his perception of identity and reality.

All Other Parts (U.S.A., Mexico), Director-Producer: Cristina Ibarra, Producers: Vanessa Perez, Heather Courtney

When Cristina Ibarra’s uncle returns to El Paso, Texas, after decades in exile following deportation, he isn’t free. Through her family’s entanglement with “crimmigration,” the director explores how surveillance and separation reshape our bonds — and how rebuilding itself becomes resistance.

Becoming Us (U.S.A.), Director: Eli Hiller, Producer: Loi Ameera Almeron

Five donor-conceived siblings, their mothers, and their long-lost biological father find each other through a DNA test. As they navigate this new reality, they heal emotional wounds, embrace their Filipino American heritage, and redefine what it means to be a family.

Casting My Mom (China), Director: Rongfei Guo, Producers: Richard Liang, Yating Du

Director Rongfei, who has never seen her birth mother, seeks to hire a “mother” for a day to explore maternal complexities and overcome the shadow of abandonment she experienced.

Supported by the Sundance Institute | Free People Creative Spirit Fund

Home Movie (Poland, France), Director: Anu Czerwinski, Producers: Anna Stylinska, Katarzyna Slesicka

Anu is a transmasculine director, but when he visits his family he shaves his mustache and plays the role of beloved daughter and sister, Anna. With the help of his camera he tries to overcome the fear of coming out while capturing a twisted family portrait with an epic courtroom finale.

Horse/Woman (working title) (U.K.), Director-Producer: Lizzie MacKenzie, Producer: Emily Copley

In a world that prizes control and domination, a fiercely independent 80-year-old scientist battles patriarchal science and inner turmoil, seeking to reveal the hidden wisdom of wild horses — and in doing so, find peace in her own untamed soul.

Indígena (Dominican Republic, U.S.A., Canada), Director-Producer: Siku Allooloo, Producer: Jessica Hallenbeck

To fulfill a dying wish, a filmmaker retraces her mother’s work as an activist and journalist during the Red Power Movement, bringing to light 500 years of Taino resistance and igniting her own journey of reclamation.

In the Black Fantastic (U.K.), Director: Julianknxx, Producers: Ekow Eshun, Debo Amon

The embrace of the fantastic holds a powerful significance — not as an escape from reality, but as a way to challenge the status quo and envision new possibilities for Black identity and personhood. In the Black Fantastic celebrates the brilliance, imagination, and world-building of Black creators.

The People Vs. Austerity/El Pueblo Vs. La Austeridad (U.S.A.), Directors-Producers: Vivian Vázquez Irizarry, Gretchen Hildebran, Producer: Neyda Martinez

In Puerto Rico, an unelected Fiscal Control Board has ruled for nearly 10 years, gutting basic services in a playbook from 1975 New York City and 2013 Detroit. But public workers, journalists, and political upstarts have been building a movement to restore democracy for the public good.

Postcards, Director: Ayşe Toprak, Producer: Ekin Çalişir

Unfiltered (U.S.A.), Director-Producer: Chelsi Bullard

A Brooklyn teenager balances helping to raise her younger siblings while reclaiming her own fleeting childhood in this coming-of-age hybrid documentary. The film explores the beauty and burdens of being an eldest daughter and constructs an escapist world where Black girls get to simply be kids.

Supported by the Sundance Institute | Free People Creative Spirit Fund

The Untitled Memory Project (U.S.A., India), Director-Producers: Rintu Thomas, Sushmit Ghosh

A 91-year old chef who has a testy relationship with her legacy collaborates with filmmakers to narrate her life. In a playful interplay between fact and fiction, a narrative emerges about love, motherhood, race, and what it takes to come from nowhere to become a future moving through the present.

Vena Acuática (El Salvador, U.S.A.), Director: Amada Torruella, Producers: Amada Torruella, Seth Gadsden, Brit Fryer

In this intimate, tender mosaic of El Salvador, women reveal the joys and perils of their lives deeply bonded with water and land. Vena Acuática is shaped by the relationships between women defending a landscape haunted by environmental negligence and forced migration.

Wind and View (Taiwan, South Korea), Director: Sheng-Hung Hsieh, Producer: Ina Hon

For over 60 years, a tiny grocery store in the Taiwanese mountains has been the center stage of a romantic love story between an Indigenous Paiwan princess and an exiled Chinese soldier.

POST-PRODUCTION

The Animated Mind of Oliver Sacks (U.S.A., U.K.), Director-Producer: Dempsey Rice, Producers: Lori Cheatle, Al Morrow

The Animated Mind of Oliver Sacks draws from a newly uncovered archive to trace the beloved neurologist and author’s early career and private struggles — revealing how one outsider’s radical empathy reshaped medicine and laid the groundwork for the neurodiversity movement.

The Art of War (Peru), Director-Producers: Grecia Barbieri, Gonzalo Benavente Secco, Producer: Carolina Denegri

A newly discovered archive linked to an ’80s fanzine titled The Art of War guides us through a polyphonic portrait where reality and artistic representation of Peru in the ’80s and ’90s blur. Times of terrorism, general crisis, and rock and roll.

The Dating Game (China, U.S.A., U.K., Norway), Director-Producer: Violet Du Feng, Producers: Joanna Natasegara, James Costa, Mette Cheng Munthe-Kaas

In a country where eligible men outnumber women by 30 million, three perpetual bachelors join an intensive seven-day dating camp led by one of China’s most sought-after dating coaches in a last-ditch effort to find a girl and love.

Finding Má (U.S.A.), Director-Producer: Thanh Tran, Producers: Eurie Chung, Anthony Pedone

After 20 years apart, an Amerasian Vietnamese and Black family shattered by the foster care and prison systems reunites to heal old wounds and rebuild their family, starting with finding their unhoused mother in the streets of Sacramento.

How to Clean a House in Ten Easy Steps (U.S.A., Colombia, Mexico), Director: Carolina González Valencia, Producers: Brenda Ávila-Hanna, Olga Segura

A domestic worker and her filmmaker daughter co-create the fictional character of a writer to uncover the slippage between truth and fantasy in a hybrid documentary that tells a story about immigration, labor, dreams, and the power of fiction to spark emancipation.

My Father and Qaddafi (Libya, U.S.A.), Director-Producer: Jihan, Producers: Dave Guenette, Mohamed Soueid, Sol Guy

A daughter unravels the disappearance of her father, the peaceful opposition leader to Qaddafi, and pieces together her mother’s 19-year search to find him. Without any memory of her father, she tries to reconnect with him and reconcile with her Libyan identity.

Pinball (U.S.A.), Director: Naveen Chaubal, Producer: Bryn Silverman

Pinball follows 19-year-old Yosef in suburban Louisville, Kentucky, as he dives into the memories of his journey from Iraq to America and what it ultimately means for him to chase his dreams in the shadow of a war that displaced his family from their Iraqi homeland.

Planet Nine (U.S.A.), Director: Daniel J. Clark, Producers: Caroline Clark, Nick Andert

The world’s greatest astronomers have calculated that a new planet, never before seen by human eyes, lurks hidden at the edge of our solar system. Now, the race is on between a handful of teams to find it, and whoever succeeds will be responsible for one of the most momentous discoveries in history.

Providencia (Colombia), Director: Juliana Schatz Preston, Producers: Guillermo Zouain, Wendy Muñiz, Tanja Tawadjoh

When a Colombian woman confronts a genetic legacy of early onset Alzheimer’s, her family’s fate becomes entwined with scientists racing for a cure, before memory itself disappears.

Untitled Girl Scout Cookie Documentary (U.S.A.), Director-Producer: Alysa Nahmias, Producers: Gregory Kershaw, Michael Dweck, Jennifer Sims

This is the story of the tenacious young women who strive to be top sellers in the annual Girl Scout Cookie sale.

Supported by the Sundance Institute | Free People Creative Spirit Fund

IMPACT AND ENGAGEMENT

For Venida, For Kalief (U.S.A.), Director-Producer: Sisa Bueno, Producers: David Felix Sutcliffe, Paola Gadala-Maria, Jasmine Mans

For Venida, For Kalief debuts the poetry of Venida Brodnax Browder, mother of Kalief Browder, whose legacy propels incarceration reform. A reimagining of criminal justice storytelling, the film weaves a cinematic mosaic of vérité, poetic visuals, and rare archival imagery from 1970s New York.