International Documentary Association (IDA) announces the initial program for Getting Real ’26, its biennial convening for documentary practitioners, held in-person in Los Angeles and virtually from July 20–23, 2026.
The industry’s current terms are no longer working. It’s time to collectively rewrite them. Getting Real ’26 will examine what documentary owes its makers, its subjects, and the public it exists to serve, with discussions on generative AI, the economics of survival in an underfunded field, new cooperative and distribution models, rising censorship, the defense of public media, and filmmakers’ political power.
IDA Executive Director Dominic Willsdon said, “IDA exists to help documentary makers keep doing their work, and right now that means confronting the forces narrowing how that work gets made and seen. But Getting Real isn’t where the field’s problems get described back to us. It’s where the filmmakers living these conditions build the responses themselves — the practical models, tactics, and alliances no one else is going to provide, and that Getting Real exists to put to work.”
The in-person festival hub is centered in Little Tokyo at the Japanese American National Museum, Japanese American Cultural & Community Center, and the Union Center for the Arts. The conference program offers panels, keynote speeches, presentations, workshops, breakout sessions, gatherings, lecture performances, receptions, a distribution-themed game show, and the return of the participatory “Build Your Own Breakout Session.”
Signature talks include keynotes from Mandy Chang, veteran documentary executive and new CEO of the Documentary Film Council, the UK’s filmmaker advocacy organization driven by working documentarians; and Petna Katondolo, Congolese filmmaker and visionary leader behind Yole!Africa, whose work spans film workshops to food sovereignty farming. Joining them are Set Hernandez and Leonard Cortana, two of documentary’s sharpest thinkers on bending systems toward justice; Pulkit Datta, Marielle Olentine, and Nik Damants from Tikkun Olam Productions, whose breakout hit Israelism and movement-based distribution strategies have amplified some of the past year’s most courageous films; and Vinay Shukla, the Indian filmmaker behind While We Watched, whose battles against censorship boards and corporate suppression made him a standout at the last Getting Real.
In late June, the full program will be announced, including 10 more main stage sessions, breakout sessions, workshops, additional signature talks, and the two films selected for Getting Real’s most popular format, “Here’s What Really Happened.”
Getting Real ’26 is programmed by Abby Sun, Meghan Monsour, and Lisa Valencia-Svensson.
More information about the Getting Real ’26 conference, which IndieWire has called the documentary film industry’s “premiere field-building gathering,” including how to register, is available at documentary.org/gettingreal26. Program details are outlined below.
Getting Real ‘26 is supported by Just Films | Ford Foundation, Wyncote Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Golden Globe Foundation, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, Wrapbook Payroll, Chiledoc, BAVC Media, and Eventive. Additional funding is provided by support from MacArthur Foundation and Spaht Family Foundation. Variety and KCRW are the official media sponsors.
For more information about sponsorship or to become part of Getting Real ’26, please email advertising@documentary.org.
PROGRAM OVERVIEW
Signature Talks
Mandy Chang (keynote) is a veteran documentary filmmaker and executive who has worked across the field as a director, producer, and commissioner in public TV (ABC and BBC) and the commercial sector (Fremantle), before being appointed CEO of the UK’s Documentary Film Council.
For Mandy, documentary film is an art form that speaks truth to power. She developed her career as the sector was being built on a base of robust public investment, often through public service broadcasting. Now, as the very foundations of documentary storytelling are under sustained attack, Mandy will deliver our first keynote on why independent documentary filmmaking cannot be protected without protecting the notion of documentary as public service. As she has said in interviews: “I think if you are privileged enough to work in this industry, you have to give something back.”
Petna Katondolo (keynote) is a Congolese filmmaker, educator, and ancestral ecologist whose artistic works are acclaimed for their decolonial African futurism. For Petna, questions of sovereignty and narrative control have been at the heart of his work as a filmmaker, educator, and community organizer for several decades. Starting with the philosophy, practices, and experiences developed at Yole!Africa, the cultural center he founded in 2000, Petna’s keynote will expand into a broader conversation about what sovereignty truly means in a world shaped by extraction, displacement, technological transformation, and the ongoing struggle for communities to tell their own stories.
Tikkun Olam Productions is a nonprofit cooperative that built the grassroots audience for their 2023 film Israelism themselves before it reached No. 1 on Apple TV’s documentary chart. Their latest award-winning project, Vs. Goliath, a docuseries about frontline communities fighting fossil fuel giants, has recently launched its impact and distribution campaign with a large coalition of partners. The collective’s grassroots success has led them to support high-impact campaigns for films including No Other Land, The Voice of Hind Rajab, Life After, The Encampments, and American Doctor, while also producing campaign media for social movements and the video podcast Beyond Israelism for Zeteo.
In this wide-ranging Fireside Chat with journalist and programmer Anthony Kaufman, three core members of the collective, Pulkit Datta, Marielle Olentine, and Nik Damants, will discuss the practical architecture of their multi-modal model: what a direct distribution and impact team actually looks like, how release strategy shapes production from the outset, and what it means to build films for more than one outcome at a time.
In a second Fireside Chat, we bring together two of documentary’s foremost thinkers, Set Hernandez and Leonard Cortana, for the first time. Both have spent years testing many of our field’s assumptions. Hernandez built their directorial debut, unseen, from the ground up as a film designed to be equitably enjoyed by blind and sighted audiences alike, then used audience impact research to make the economic and civic case for films that serve communities the industry has yet to take seriously. Cortana, a scholar, filmmaker, op-ed writer, and doctoral researcher, came to documentary through humanitarian work before channeling that formation into building BIPOC EURODOC, a collective infrastructure for producers navigating an international ecosystem. What connects them is a shared refusal to wait, to ask permission, to soften the critique, or to pretend the problem is smaller than it is. This conversation brings them together to talk about the provocation of impact and what it actually takes to keep going.
Panels / Conversations
How We Resist: The Filmmakers United
Around the world, documentary filmmakers are navigating censorship, surveillance, legal persecution, and the slow erosion of independent filmmaking. These pressures aren’t new. Filmmakers have been developing responses, protections, and collective strategies for decades. But the forms of repression are multiplying: state funding withdrawn and film festivals targeted by politicians; film ratings boards and corporate platforms pressured into compliance; filmmakers surveilled, prosecuted, and exiled for daring to film. In this conversation, filmmakers who have faced these conditions will share how they fought back through legal appeals, media strategy, activist networks, and the slow work of building institutions.
Supported by Grace Lay — LinLay Productions
Moderator: Orwa Nyrabia
Panelists: Lucía Requejo (Fuera de Campo), Vinay Shukla (While We Watched), Ingrid Raphael (No Evil Eye Cinema), Alina Simone (Black Snow)
Terms of Engagement: Learning From Coalition Politics
With U.S. federal arts funding gutted, public media infrastructure under pressure, and media consolidation accelerating, the conditions under which documentary is made, distributed, and seen are now explicitly political questions. Sectors facing parallel pressures in local journalism, music, and the arts broadly have learned that fragmented advocacy loses; coalitions win. In this panel, we will hear from grassroots coalitions who have launched campaigns, won policy victories, and built field-wide political power where there was none, to explore what cross-sector coalition-building looks like in practice. They will discuss how they identified leverage points, what has worked, and what it would take for documentary filmmakers to show up, and stay, as a political force.
Panelists: Brigid O’Shea (Documentary Association of Europe), Maya Chupkov (Common Cause), Jax Deluca (Future Film Coalition)
Past the Panic: What Really Matters in AI and Documentary
Most industry discussions about AI have focused considerable energy on whether AI is a threat or an opportunity, a tool or a menace, or headed straight into boosterism. Meanwhile, the actual terms of its integration into documentary workflow are being set without us: in editing suites, in platform algorithms, and in the compute infrastructure being built on extracted data and contested labor. For the past year, Kat Cizek (MIT Co-Creation Studio) and shirin anlen (WITNESS) have been tracking these developments through a monthly column in Documentary magazine and as part of the steering committee of the AI + Documentary Working Group. In this session, Cizek and anlen will present two case studies of AI in recent documentary practice, map the emerging field of movement-building in response to the AI industrial complex (from open-source alternatives to grassroots resistance against the environmental costs of data centers), and open the conversation to panelists working at the intersection of AI, documentary, and advocacy beyond North America.
This panel conversation is paired with a workshop (“AI Tools for Documentary Production”) facilitated by Jorge Caballero and Anna Giralt Gris, which will demonstrate how documentarians can use AI to create research, investigative, and workflow tools that work for us, by us. Conferencegoers are encouraged to attend both if they’re interested in the practical and ethical applications of AI.
Moderator: Kat Cizek (MIT Co-Creation Studio)
Panelists: shirin anlen (WITNESS), Anna Giralt Gris (Artefacto), and more TBA
What’s the Deal: A Distribution Game Show
Knowledge is power. For many of us, alternative forms of distribution beyond working with a distributor, broadcaster, or platform seem like a backup plan. But for some, and perhaps many, projects, other pathways may lead to more impacted audiences and impactful screenings, even if they are developed out of necessity. For well-connected filmmakers, we hear rumors of these supposedly ancillary deals and how they work through the whisper network. It’s time to bring these conversations out of the corners of happy hours and into the open. In What’s the Deal, an experimental panel format crossed with a game show, filmmaker-host Chase Whiteside will dive into these questions with experienced producers who are willing to share their secrets and successes, but only after their fellow panelists and the audience first take their best guesses at what the real deals were.
This event will be livestreamed but not recorded and will not be available for replay after the event.
The Hot Seat
Despite our best efforts to create a more just and distributed documentary ecosystem, we still live in a world where a small group of people select or acquire films for the entities filmmakers desire: unrestricted grants, influential international film festivals, deep-pocketed platforms, and legacy broadcasters. Questions and assumptions about their processes as crucial points of access and support for filmmakers tend toward the worst. For this session, we turn the tables. These intrepid gatekeepers have pledged to give honest answers to your questions, especially the most challenging ones.
Moderator: Abby Sun (IDA)
Panelists: Amanda Lebow (CAA), Mara Gourd-Mercado (CPH:INDUSTRY), Basil Tsiokos (Sundance), and Chris Hastings (WXXI)
Hold Our Ground: Advocating for Independent Film in the U.S.
In the past eighteen months, Future Film Coalition has organized independent film in the U.S. in ways we haven’t seen in decades: building a public membership coalition, gathering filmmaker testimony for federal antitrust regulators, and testifying before the U.S. Senate. In partnership with IDA and other coalition partners, we will take stock of the Block the Merger campaign’s accomplishments and the current status of the consolidation fight. FFC will also present the case for a first-of-its-kind national economic impact study of U.S. independent film production, which would for the first time quantify what independent film contributes to local economies, workforce development, and the broader screen sector. The session closes with the harder question: beyond fighting mergers, what policy interventions in antitrust enforcement, public funding, and tax incentive structures could durably protect the independent ecosystem? Come ready to act.
Co-programmed with the Future Film Coalition
Ground Level: Public Interest, Local Trust
Public media in the United States, and across much of the democratic world, is under pressure from political interference, funding withdrawal, and the gravitational pull of multinational platforms that have little interest in local communities. But the institutions best positioned to serve those communities may not be the existing national ones fighting to survive. A new generation of local and regional public media leaders are reimagining what it means to be publicly supported: building trust through proximity, forging coalitions across cities. This conversation brings together practitioners from across public (interest) media, in the U.S. and internationally, to ask what a new localism for documentary might look like, and what it would require to build it.
By Our Reckoning: Transitional Justice
Not every documentary needs to justify its impact. But some films enter history at precisely the moment when courts, governments, and societies, despite the work of truth and reconciliation commissions, have failed or refused to reckon with the past. In many places, documentary has reached into the silences left by legal processes: into families, generational inheritance, the gap between what a country officially remembers and what its survivors know to be true, and what the descendants of perpetrators would rather forget. This conversation brings together filmmakers whose work has become part of the transitional justice movements their films document, and has even inspired global activist movements advocating for accountability. How much can cinema really help break pacts of silence, support legal campaigns, and work toward peace and reconciliation that persist long after a film’s release?
Moderator: Leonard Cortana
Lisette Orozco (Adriana’s Pact, Colectivo de Historias Desobedientes); Almudena Carracedo (The Silence of Others); and others TBA
Workshops
Renowned members of our community and the most interesting thinkers working in adjacent fields draw from sundry experiences as they dive deep into their craft. In our workshops, you’ll encounter ideas that can inform your own practice.
Budgeting in Troubled Times: Maximize Your Resources and Finish Your Film
At a time when documentary filmmakers face extreme fundraising difficulties, documentary budget expert Robert Bahar pivots from his usual workshop to address the elephant in the room: how do you protect your creative vision when the financial ground keeps moving?
In this workshop, Robert will break the filmmaking process into discrete production stages, guiding participants through a workflow for maintaining your full vision for a project while making necessary adjustments to the budget as fundraising realities come into focus, one stage at a time. Practical and empowering in equal measure, this approach helps filmmakers plan ahead, avoid compromise, and ensure their work can be completed.
Facilitator: Robert Bahar (You Are Not Alone: Fighting the Wolf Pack)
Moderator: Lisa Valencia-Svensson (Getting Real ’26)
Loading Your Trojan Horse
Documentary filmmakers working on socially engaged projects are accustomed to thinking about impact in terms of reach: funders, festivals, audiences. But getting people to watch is not the same as changing what they believe, and changing what they believe is not the same as changing the world. Researcher and author Sarah Stein Lubrano studies how people actually change their minds, and her findings challenge many assumptions about how art and politics intersect. In this workshop, she will introduce filmmakers to key theories of power and political change, drawing on her research into cognitive dissonance and political communication. Then she will guide attendees to pressure-test and refine their own theory of change for the work we make.
Facilitator: Sarah Stein Lubrano (Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds)
Who Do You See? Casting as Recognition
Many of the difficulties documentary filmmakers encounter, in collaboration, in the fraught ethics of representation, in distribution, are often framed as problems of production. But could many of these difficulties begin much earlier, in who is chosen to be a part of our documentaries, and why? Director Sarvnik Kaur has built a filmography of films featuring protagonists whose lives, relationships, and situations embody contexts far beyond their individual selves. In this workshop, she will first share her philosophy of mutual recognition and surrender that leads her to subjects who are co-authors of their own stories, carrying truths larger than they yet realize. In the second half, Kaur will then guide selected audience members through a “stripped-from-the-headlines” exercise to help strengthen our casting muscles and build our storytelling instincts.
Facilitator: Sarvnik Kaur (Against the Tide)
Moderator: Brigid O’Shea (Documentary Association of Europe)
AI Tools for Documentary Production
Instead of relying solely on closed, off-the-shelf AI products, a growing number of filmmakers are creating their own applications and integrating AI in their filmmaking on their own terms. Imagine a forensic reconstruction algorithm designed to turn public footage into analyzable evidence; a computational reader for massive data analysis; a semantic search engine that allows a director to retrieve archival and rush material by meaning rather than by tag; and a voice system to assist a protagonist with specific needs. Each of these tools was, in fact, built by the filmmakers at Artefacto Films, a Barcelona-based research and production studio, with an AI coding assistant, a practice now widely known as “vibecoding,” in which plain speech is transformed into executable code. Their small library of internal tools sits beside the development desk, the camera, and the edit as essential parts of their trade, and perhaps it could be part of yours, too.
This workshop will open with an overview of how filmmakers are applying AI to nonfiction today, and how documentarians can use AI to create research, investigative, and workflow tools that work for us, by us. Artefacto Films’ Jorge Caballero and Anna Giralt Gris will walk us through one of their applications and demonstrate how it was created. Attendees will leave with a concrete sense of what it means to build, not just use, AI inside a documentary practice.
Facilitators: Jorge Caballero and Anna Giralt Gris (Artefacto Films)
Moderator: Sergio Lobo-Navia (Getting Real ’26)
Breakout Sessions
Real Talk on Financial Instability (Filmmaker Case Studies With A-Doc)
The reality of independent filmmaking is that most projects do not raise their full budgets. So what do you do when cash flow dries up or never comes in? In this A-Doc-led breakout, you will learn how to form a strategy for getting your film made, with advice from those who have successfully made it through. Guest filmmakers will first share their approaches, tailored to their specific projects and situations. Attendees will then break out into groups, with one guest filmmaker in each group to answer your burning questions. This session is complementary to Robert Bahar’s “Budgeting in Troubled Times: Maximize Your Resources and Finish Your Film,” where you will learn how to implement these strategies and make the most of the funds you have using real-world tools.
A-Doc is a national network that works to increase the visibility and support of Asian Americans in the documentary field.
Blueprinting for Filmmaker Co-ops (With Yael Bridge)
Massive defunding and consolidation across the industry have made it harder, if not impossible, for many filmmakers to sustain a living from their craft. In response, structural alternatives such as cooperatives seem to offer a different path forward by reducing overhead, distributing costs, and creating more durable career paths. But what is a worker-owned co-op, and what does it actually take to start and run one?
In this breakout session, filmmaker Yael Bridge guides us through what a sustainable filmmaking practice could look like and leads an open exploration of the cooperative business models available to independent documentary and media makers. From traditional structures to emerging collective models, the session zeroes in on the cooperative form: how it works, what it requires, and what it could look like in our field. Yael is joined by members of filmmaker cooperatives that have operated successfully for years.
Together, participants will examine the real economics of cooperative enterprise, including how shared infrastructure and pooled resources can bring down total budgets, and will workshop their own ideas for what a filmmaker-owned cooperative could look like in practice.
Participant Compensation and Documentary Ethics (With the Documentary Producers Alliance Ethics Committee)
Although questions about participant compensation have dogged documentarians for decades, they are becoming more urgent, complex, and widespread. We observe that filmmakers increasingly encounter requests for payment in exchange for access. They must balance these requests with institutional expectations to uphold longstanding journalistic concerns, funder and distributor restrictions on participant compensation, shrinking production budgets, and ethical questions around authorship and fairness, such as those raised by the Documentary Accountability Working Group and Margie Ratliff’s Documentary Participants Empowerment Alliance. In an industry where independent nonfiction work is usually underfunded, what counts as compensation? When should compensation occur? And how do these choices affect trust, consent, authorship, and power?
The Documentary Producers Alliance Ethics Committee, co-chaired by Lisa Leeman and Alexandra Blaney, has witnessed a growing need for candid conversations about participant compensation. As the DPA begins a new initiative focused on participant compensation, this session will help gather field information and identify the systemic changes needed.
Build Your Own Breakout!
This participatory session will take place in person for All Access passholders. Putting into place all the skills, ideas, and inspirations that we’ve garnered throughout the four days of the conference, experienced facilitators will guide attendees through a brainstorming process to gather issues important to us. We will then connect attendees with similar interests so we can all build our own breakout sessions to turn desire into action.
Gatherings
Lights, Coffee, Action!
From funding to distribution, the documentary landscape has experienced tremendous changes over the past few years. Some entities have merged, others have folded, and still others have changed their funding priorities. For filmmakers, it can be difficult to track the changes. During this breakfast, entities representing foundations, nonprofits, streamers, and broadcasters will welcome you to their tables. A simultaneous version of this event will also occur on our virtual platform. In this casual setting, you will be able to meet some of the current players and understand what types of projects they are looking to support. After every 20 minutes, all attendees will rotate to a new table, so they can meet multiple types of supporters.
This event is the one place during Getting Real that operates outside of the conference’s “no-pitch zone.” If you would like to participate as a funding/buying organization, please email Lilla Sparks at lilla.sparks@documentary.org.
Industry Expo Lunch
From products to services, the documentary landscape has undergone significant innovation over the past few years. For filmmakers and other professionals in the documentary industry, staying informed about these advancements can be daunting. During this lunch on the JACCC Plaza, a diverse array of organizations will showcase their services and products for those seeking the tools to advance in the documentary field. A full list of vendors is forthcoming.
Last Call: An IDA Member Party
Let’s come together for one last call with good people, a good party, and a few more good memories. IDA members are invited to join us for late-night appetizers, drinks, and a special activity from conference speaker Sarah Stein Lubrano (“Come as strangers; leave as friends”). Plus, we are giving away Think Tank bags throughout the party.
