Firelight Media’s flagship 18-month fellowship program supporting Black, Indigenous, and other filmmakers of color is now in its eleventh year.
NEW YORK — October 29, 2020 — Firelight Media today announced the newest cohort of Fellows selected to the Documentary Lab, the organization’s flagship mentoring program. Firelight, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, is proud to cap off an especially tumultuous year by looking ahead to the industry’s future through these 14 emerging filmmakers with wide-ranging backgrounds and perspectives.
Firelight co-founders Stanley Nelson and Marcia Smith launched the Documentary Lab in 2009 as a fellowship program to support filmmakers of color working on their first or second feature length documentary film. Today, the Lab provides filmmakers with funding, customized mentorship from prominent leaders in the documentary world, professional development workshops, and networking opportunities. Firelight also awards a $15,000 grant for each project accepted into the Documentary Lab.
The projects the new class bring to the Fellowship range from stories of generational Black farmers in the American South, the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Montana, and personal stories centered around family, immigration, ancestry, identity, and more.
“It has been an extraordinarily challenging year for documentary filmmakers, especially emerging filmmakers of color, which Firelight’s Documentary Lab is designed to support,” said Loira Limbal, Firelight Media’s SVP for Programs. “Between the dual crises of the global pandemic and the national reckoning with racist violence in the U.S., filmmakers like the 14 Fellows we’ve just welcomed into the Lab need funding, professional networks, and a supportive community of peers perhaps more than ever before. Firelight is proud to provide this support at a such crucial time in the careers of these filmmakers and at this moment in our nation’s history.”
With the announcement of the new cohort for 2020–2022, Firelight Media will have supported over 100 filmmakers through the Documentary Lab over the last 11 years. 2020 has been a banner year for previous Doc Lab fellows, who released many timely projects across a variety of digital platforms including Dawn Porter (2011), who directed two well-regarded political films this year — John Lewis: Good Trouble, an intimate account of the congressman and civil rights icon’s life and legacy, and The Way I See It, a documentary on former White House photographer Pete Souza which aired on MSNBC earlier this month; and Yoruba Richen (2010), who directed The Sit In: Harry Belafonte Hosts the Tonight Show for NBC’s Peacock, as well as The Killing of Breonna Taylor, presented by The New York Times on FX.
Read more at Firelight Media's Medium page.
