PHOTOGRAPH BY NANCY FRIEDMAN
MOVIEMAKER.COM SPRING 2020 33A veteran
documentary
producer and
director explores
what to know
when applying
for institutional
grant support
BY ALYSA NAHMIAS,
AS TOLD TO CALEB
HAMMONDtary, and try to figure out which ones match
with the kind of film you’re making and how
this fits the timeline for your project.THE APPLICATION
Doc moviemakers used to understandably
get frustrated by the fact that each grant
application was comprised of different ques-
tions, and the answers and work samples all
had to be different lengths—which required
a lot of work on each individual application.
So a few years ago, the major players came
together and developed something that’smakers, like the Women In Film Finishing
Fund, want to help you with that last push
on your film, so you wouldn’t apply to them
until your film is in post and you have a
rough cut. Some have geographic or career-
based mandates: The Jerome Foundation
grant, which is one of the first grants I won
as a director many years ago, is specific to
Minnesota and New York City, and requires
that the director reside in one of those loca-
tions and be early in her/his career.
You should start researching grants as
soon as you know you’re making a documen-akin to the common app for colleges. These
organizations, including the Sundance Docu-
mentary Fund, Chicken & Egg, SFFILM, and
the International Documentary Association,
now all share a common app.
It’s called the Documentary Core
Application, and you can find the different
required sections at documentary.org/
core-application. Sometimes an
organization will have its own unique
question or two that it adds.
A great exercise to do once you have clarity
about your project is to begin generating a