Firelight Media’s flagship fellowship program for emerging filmmakers is now in its fourteenth cycle.

Firelight Media has announced the cohort of 10 fellows selected for the Documentary Lab, the organization’s longest-running artist program. Filmmakers accepted into the Documentary Lab receive a $25,000 project grant, along with customized mentorship from prominent leaders in the documentary field, professional development opportunities, artist retreats, and networking opportunities.

For the first time, the 2026–2027 Documentary Lab accepted applications only from projects in post-production. In an effort to be responsive to the increasingly challenging funding and distribution landscape in the documentary field, all projects in the fellowship are aligned at a similar stage, allowing the 12-month program to focus on story development and project feedback, helping to move films significantly closer to completion.

The projects the new class brings to the Fellowship include stories of self-actualization among queer and trans elders, women seeking liberation from the constraints of restrictive marriages, and Indigenous people reclaiming their land and culture through environmental activism and athletics.

“On behalf of the Firelight Media team, I’m proud to welcome the newest cohort of Documentary Lab fellows to the Firelight family. The films they bring to the Lab are united by themes of resistance, belonging, and liberation through self-determination,” said Lu Mukerjee, the Documentary Lab’s director. “The focus of this year’s Lab is to serve as a bridge for films in post-production, providing the artistic, professional, and financial resources these filmmakers need to bring their projects closer to completion. I’m confident these remarkable films will resonate with the communities they were made for, as well as wider audiences and industry.”

The 2026–2027 Documentary Lab fellows and their projects are:

• Yusuf Ahmed [he/him], Your Love Brought Me Here
  Thirty years after his father was taken from his home in eastern Ethiopia, filmmaker Yusuf Ahmed follows his family from Ohio across the mountains of Hararghe, searching for his grave.
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• Abdul Aziz [he/him], Rudiments
  Rudiments is a story about Black excellence, mentorship, and cultural preservation against a backdrop of social abandonment. In a city where failing schools, scarce employment opportunities, violent crime, and mass incarceration disproportionately affect Black communities, a marching band emerges as an opportunity for “making it out.”
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• Alex J. Bledsoe [she/her], Oaklead
  In Oakland, California, we fight to protect our children from lead poisoning in our own homes and schools — and confront over a century of environmental racism. Oaklead is a feature-length documentary currently in post-production about the longest ongoing pediatric epidemic in U.S. history.
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• Aurora Brachman [she/her], Dear You
  After escaping an abusive marriage and fleeing to the U.S., Grace James finds herself trapped in the U.S. asylum system for 10 years. In this poetic portrait of a woman in limbo, haunting memories begin to resurface of Grace’s past life in her homeland — the island nation of Kiribati.
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• Brit Fryer [he/him], With TimeA storytelling workshop invites a group of trans participants aged fifty and older to explore moments of gender euphoria, connection, and mutual recognition. Through improvisation and discussion, each participant develops a narrative script from a significant memory, exploring formative moments that deepened their relationships to queerness and community.
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• Erin Semine Kökdil [she/her], La Tierra Recuerda [The Earth Remembers]
  In a landscape scarred by centuries of extraction, the Indigenous Maya Poqomam community of Santa Cruz Chinautla, Guatemala, resists erasure. As rivers turn toxic and land begins to sink, a movement rises — led by women, guided by ancestral memory, and grounded in their relationship to clay — to defend their land, culture, and future.
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• Chona Mangalindan [she/her], Untying the Knot
  In the Philippines, the only country outside the Vatican where divorce remains illegal, three women fight to leave marriages they can no longer endure. As they navigate a system offering no legal exit, an 82-year-old lawmaker leads a final push to change the law, confronting powerful religious opposition.
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• Felix Rodriguez [he/him], My Ballroom Story
  An Afro-Latino filmmaker in his 50s revisits his 1990s ballroom footage, confronting internalized homophobia, family conditioning, and identity through resilience, healing, preservation, and self-acceptance.
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• Kamran Rosen [he/him], The Undefeated
  For centuries, America tried to erase Native culture, banning Indigenous languages and religion. Now, three Native youth athletes are using sports to reclaim the power of their people — igniting pride in their communities and themselves. Not only surviving but thriving, they are: The Undefeated.
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• Elena Lecun Xiang [she/her], Goodbye, Yiwu (working title)
  After a lifetime apart from her mother, filmmaker Lecun returns to Yiwu, the global hub of small-commodity trade and her childhood wonderland, to film a Pakistani working mother and her son. As she traces the hidden sacrifices of motherhood, she confronts the painful truth of her own left-behind childhood.

The 2026–2027 Documentary Lab Fellows were selected from a pool of more than 140 applicants. The review process included the work of a dedicated selection committee and culminated in final selections by an Advisory Board comprising prominent documentary industry leaders, including Opal H. Bennett, Senior Producer at POV and Executive Producer of POV Shorts; Jannet Nunez, producer and film consultant; and independent filmmakers Felix Endara, Jacqueline Olive, and Steve Maing.

Firelight Media has supported 170 filmmakers through the Documentary Lab over the last 16 years as part of its mission to make the nonfiction film industry — and public media in particular — more representative of the audience it serves. Recent Documentary Lab alumni include Adam and Zack Khalil, co-directors of Aanikoobijigan [ancestor / great-grandparent / great-grandchild], which won the NEXT Audience Award at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival; Brittany Shyne, whose film Seeds won the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival; and Contessa Gayles, whose documentary visual album Songs from the Hole won a 2026 News & Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding Art Direction.