EXCLUSIVE: Documentary artists confronting media consolidation, a tightened acquisition market and other challenges are about to get a major lift from the Points North Institute, the nonprofit that puts on the Camden International Film Festival in Maine.

On Monday, the institute announced its 2026 Artist Programs, a slate of pitching events, residencies, curated meetings and more that will support talented artists from diverse backgrounds. Prominent mentors, funders, and collaborators will be on hand to work with 40 teams across 27 countries who have documentary projects in development. “Three-quarters of the supported projects are directed or co-directed by filmmakers of color and 60% by women or non-binary filmmakers,” the institute said.

PNI also announced details of its annual Points North Forum that “will gather filmmakers and industry leaders for intimate, forward-looking conversations at a moment of profound change.” Several Forum sessions will address the state of public media, which saw deep funding cuts last year pushed by Pres. Trump and passed by the Republican-controlled Congress.

Both the Artist Programs and the Points North Forum run in tandem with the Camden International Film Festival, set to unfold from Sept. 17-20 in the bucolic towns of Camden and Rockland in Maine’s mid-coast region. Scroll for details on the Artist Programs and Forum.

“When so much of the infrastructure that has historically served independent filmmakers is being dismantled,” observed Sean Flynn, artistic director and co-founder of the Points North Institute, “it is more important than ever to create spaces where artists can find the time, resources, and community they need to bring their visions to life. It is an honor to support their journeys and convene the field to imagine and build more durable, abundant systems that will expand the horizons of the documentary form.”

—The 17th annual Points North Pitch, part of the Points North Fellowship and one of North America’s leading documentary pitching forums, will see six feature docs in progress pitching to a panel of funders, producers and executives. Selected filmmakers will be mentored by Sundance Institute’s Kristin Feeley and program alum Assia Boundaoui.

—The second cohort of Diane Weyermann Fellows will gather for their final creative retreat. The program supports three director-producer teams with $100,000 unrestricted grants – one of the largest funds in the US – and an 18-month collaborative fellowship. Advisors include Tabitha Jackson, Kirsten Johnson and Andrea Meditch.

—Additional programs include the LEF/CIFF Fellowship, supporting New England-based filmmakers working on feature documentaries, and the year-long 4th World Media Lab, which supports early- and mid-career Indigenous filmmakers from across Turtle Island, in partnership with Big Sky Documentary Festival and Seattle International Film Festival.

—Points North will host cohorts from the BAVC MediaMaker Fellowship, CAAM’s Building Bridges Grantees, and the Disabled Nonfiction Producer Apprenticeship run by FWD-DOC and Multitude Films. The festival will serve as the kickoff for the second cycle of a collaboration between American Documentary | POV, Chicken & Egg Films, TIME Studios and Bird Street Productions focused on short documentaries. This cycle’s cohort includes Sierra Ulrich (Dad Hair), Kristine Stolakis (Hard Labor), and Alyse Shorland (Write Me a Letter).

—Filmmakers will have access to 400+ curated meetings with more than 100 industry professionals through Points North’s 1:1 Meetings, including representatives from Sundance Institute, Hulu, Watermelon Pictures, Chicken & Egg Films, and The New York Times

HIghlights From Points North Forum (sponsored by ESPN Films):

—Memory Work: Activating Black Archives creates a dialogue between two CIFF selections, Once Upon a Time in Harlem and Windows of Time, and Harvard Black Film Project’s Jackie Glover exploring the significance of community-driven archival practices in the context of the federal government’s erasure and revision of Black histories.

—Three sessions take up the current state of public media:

*In Field Briefing: Public Interest Media at Risk, Maggie Bowman presents the findings of a new report commissioned by the Ford Foundation, which documents approximately $45 million in direct federal investment in public-interest documentary eliminated by the cuts of 2025.

*In Public Media Metamorphosis, executives from FRONTLINE, American Documentary, WXXI and NPR Studios describe how their organizations are expanding into digital distribution as the traditional broadcast model is disrupted.

*The Forum closes on Sunday with a regional strategy session convened with Future Film Coalition and the Maine Film Association, asking what it would take to build a more durable media ecosystem in New England.

—Magnum photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti, director of the CIFF opener and Locarno winning The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer, will discuss her artistic practice with Cinema Tropical’s Carlos A. GutiĂ©rrez.

—Festival alum Keith Wilson brings the fourth episode of Pleased to Announce, his live documentary performance on the financial and emotional costs of awards campaigns, following presentations at CPH:DOX, Cannes and DC/DOX.

—Finally, the 5th edition of Points North’s Documentary Town Hall, moderated by Beadie Finzi, will explore how documentary filmmakers and their allies can respond to this moment of uncertainty with vision, ambition and deeper collaboration, building new models for connecting independent work with audiences.

Further details about 2026 Points North Institute Artist Programs:

The Points North Fellowship supports six filmmaking teams as they develop their pitches and publicly present their documentary features-in-progress to a panel of funders and distributors at CIFF’s popular Points North Pitch. Points North’s Executive Director, Elise McCave, will moderate the event. Confirmed pitch panelists include Andrea Alarcón, Sundance Institute; Opal H. Bennett, American Documentary | POV; Daniel J. Chalfen, Naked Edge Films; Nikki Heyman, Doc Society; Eric Hynes, Jacob Burns Film Center; Kiyoko McCrae, Chicken & EggFilms; Anya Rous, Multitude Films; and Paulina Suarez, Ford Foundation. The program’s mentors are Assia Boundaoui, Kristin Feeley, and Andrea Meditch. The program is made possible by sponsorship from the deNovo Initiative.

Choreography of a Tyrant (France, Syria, USA, Norway, Qatar)

Directed by Qutaiba Barhamji. Produced by Anne-Catherine Witt and co-produced by Nesa Azimi.

After discovering 14 censored frames showing Hafez al-Assad chasing a fly, a filmmaker investigates how authoritarian power constructs sacred images and how a single flaw can unravel a carefully engineered myth.

Directed by Julia Rosenheim. Produced by Karen GaytĂĄn & Jazz Szympruch.

In Springdale, Arkansas, immigrant poultry workers endure dangerous conditions in silence—until an organizer invites them to turn their experiences into theater. As performing begins to transform how they see themselves, immigration crackdowns force them to decide whether they can afford to keep going.

Kamnop: A Treasure is Waiting for You (USA, France, Cambodia, Spain)

Directed by Kanitha Heng Snow & Guillermo Roques. Produced by Christian Popp.

Kamnop is an exhilarating and transformative road trip, where a mother and daughter travel from Colorado to Cambodia in search of a long-lost treasure, buried during the first days of the Khmer Rouge genocide.

Oh Heart, Don’t Be Afraid (Georgia, France, Germany)

Directed and produced by Ana Kvichidze. Produced by Mariam Bitsadze, Valerianne Boue and Natalia Imaz.

Dachi is a queer person (they/them) from a religious place in Georgia, oppressed by the Archbishop, religious society and even their own family. They find an old witch, taught and empowered with her magic spells and they begin to change reality.

Amid changing forests, a blind Polish linguist searches for sounds she believes can express what human language cannot.

Directed by CĂ©sar MartĂ­nez Barba. Produced by Henry Kinder & Sean Weiner. Untitled Alamo Reenactment Project explores the construction of the Alamo story. From the voices of reenactors to the ghostly presence of Mexican “soldados” haunting San Antonio, the hybrid film examines how this narrative shapes the landscape of today.

Now in its eleventh year, the 4th World Media Lab continues to serve as a vital space for emerging and mid-career Indigenous filmmakers to develop their craft, strengthen their networks and advance projects rooted in cultural integrity and community care. This year’s cohort gathers five visionary artists from across Turtle Island and Pasifika, whose work reflects both artistic rigor and deep relational accountability.

The program’s mentors include Yvonne Russo, Tracy Rector, Chris Newell and guest artist Paige Bethmann.

Noelani Kanuha Auguston is a member of Shx ̌ whĂĄ:y Village, with Nooksack and Hawaiian heritage. A wife and mother of two young boys, she and her husband are raising their family in their homelands along the Nooksack River. She earned her BA from the University of Washington and, guided by a deep love of storytelling, went on to earn her MFA in creative writing with a focus in screenwriting from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Noelani currently writes and produces for Children of the Setting Sun Productions. Her work is rooted in an authentic Indigenous worldview, with a particular focus on the peoples of the Salish Sea. She is driven by a commitment to creating hopeful, transformative representations of Native life, especially for youth, offering characters and stories that reflect strength, possibility and self-recognition.

Quannah ChasingHorse is a Han Gwich’in and Sicangu/Oglala Lakota land protector and fashion model from Eagle Village, Alaska, and the tribes of South Dakota. Quannah is a fourth-generation land protector; her deep connection to her homelands and her people’s way of life is her grounding and guiding force. She gained prominence through a 2020 Calvin Klein campaign and has since worked with the top global fashion houses; won countless awards; starred in Reservation Dogs and Thin Places; and graced the covers of numerous magazines, including Vogue, Elle and Harper’s Bazaar. Quannah’s short film, Walking Two Worlds, won awards and streams on The North Face’s channels. Amid Quannah’s accomplishments, her most important work is using her platform to uphold and uplift her Indigenous values and peoples.

Montana Cypress is a Los Angeles-based playwright, filmmaker and actor. Originally from the Miccosukee Tribe located in South Florida, he has studied acting at New York Film Academy, the British Academy of Dramatic Acting, and UCLA’s Professional Acting Program. He is a three-time winner of the Von Marie Atchley Excellence in Playwriting Award; winner of Best Native American Directed Short at Phoenix Film Festival; had a full-length comedy stageplay, AChristmas In Ochopee, premiere in Minneapolis, produced by New Native Theatre; and his documentary about alligator wrestling, The Art of Gator Wrestling, can be viewed on PBS North’s YouTube channel. Montana recently played Chief Bromden in the stage adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the Gainesville Playhouse. He can also be seen in the film Young Washington, released in theaters in July 2026.

Banchi Hanuse works across film and radio as a co-founder of Nuxalk Radio, supporting Nuxalk language revitalization, upholding Nuxalk Nationhood and advocating for stewardship of Nuxalk homelands. She directed her first feature documentary, Aitamaako’tamisskapi Natosi: Before the Sun, in 2023. Most recently, Banchi premiered her second feature film, Ceremony, at SXSW in 2026, where it garnered the Documentary Spotlight Audience Award.

Lokotah Sanborn is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker from the Penobscot Nation Reservation. Lokotah works for Sunlight Media Collective, documenting stories at the intersection of Wabanaki sovereignty and environmental justice. From 2023-25, his video work featured in the traveling exhibition Exploding Native Inevitable, which toured the U.S. He received the Lunder Institute Fellowship (Colby College) and North Star Fellowship (Points North Institute) in 2024 and the David C. Driskell Fellowship (Indigo Arts Alliance) in 2025. His directorial debut, Otherworld, made in collaboration with Odanak Abenaki writer and composer Mali Obomsawin, premiered at BlackStar in August 2025. He co-directed the short Wabanaki Voices in Recovery with Mi’kmaq filmmaker Jared Lank, produced by Points North Institute. His artwork was featured in the MET’s unsanctioned exhibition Encoded, and he won two 2025 Webby Awards. Lokotah is developing his first feature-length documentary.

Points North’s long-standing commitment to supporting regional filmmakers is evident in theLEF/CIFF Fellowship. This program, developed in partnership with the LEF Foundation, offers five New England–based filmmakers with feature documentaries in production or post-production the opportunity to attend CIFF for project development workshops and industry meetings.

The LEF/CIFF Fellowship cohort will be mentored by filmmaker Todd Chandler.

Directed by Bronte Stahl. Produced by Isabella Rinaldi.

Francesco leads personalized ancestral tours in Sicily for Americans in search of their roots. Among the bureaucratic, parochial, pastoral and familial spaces his work takes his clients, a reflection on roots, gentrification and the act of remaining emerges.

Directed by Dominic Yarabe. Produced by Eliza Soros, Natalia Almada, Pamela Martinez and Carlo Nasisse.

Bobia, a rural village in Cîte d’Ivoire, keeps a buried secret. The war has one memory, and it is three generations long. In a place where history was never written down, the memory of this largely erased civil war survives through children’s dreams, adult silences and a mother’s nightly bedtime stories.

Dr. Syeed is a retired leader of the Muslim community, a diehard optimist and, at 80, he’s losing his memory and his voice. He’s desperate to find someone to document his eventful life, from serving time as a political prisoner in Kashmir to his pioneering interfaith work in America. But the best he can find is a reluctant, cynical filmmaker who happens to be his youngest son: me.

Directed by Andrea Patiño Contreras. Produced by Gabriela Díaz Arp.

Amidst her father’s terminal cancer, a filmmaker interrogates the origins of a family heirloom: a tsantsa, or shrunken human head, acquired by her grandfather in the 1940s. As her father reckons with the question of where to rest his own body, the filmmaker wonders whether the tsantsa deserves the same.

After the property crisis cuts off family support, a filmmaker returns from the US to find his home demolished by a bankrupt father who once shaped Shenzhen’s skyline. Drifting in a city in economic retreat, he searches for the meaning of making a family film amid the family’s collapse.

The Diane Weyermann Fellowship at Points North was established to honor the legacy of Diane Weyermann, a prolific producer and pillar of the nonfiction filmmaking community. The Fellowship identifies three advanced career directors and producers working on creatively expansive, cinematic feature-length documentaries that address poignant and urgent themes of our time. The 18-month program is one of the most robust artist development initiatives for documentary filmmakers offered by a U.S.-based organization.

The Diane Weyermann Fellowshipprovides $100,000 in unrestricted funding for each project, as well as two creative retreats. The program is tailored to the needs of each film team, giving each project team a creative space to explore and expand possibilities for their films and careers. The Diane Weyermann Fellowship was developed by Points North in partnership with Participant Media and is made possible by seed funding from the Skoll Foundation and major support from the RandomGood Foundation, Ford Foundation’s JustFilms and over 200 individual supporters.

The cohort will be joined on their final retreat by creative advisors Kirsten Johnson, Andrea Meditch and Tabitha Jackson.

The 2025-2026 Weyermann Fellowship projects and artists follow:

Directed by Natalia Almada. Produced by Esther Robinson and Josh Penn.

Captions Will be Needed is filmmaker Natalia Almada’s cinematic response to living with a rare cancer that has reconfigured her relationship to time.

Directed and produced by Maya Newell. Produced by Alex Kelly, Larissa Behrendt AO, Sophie Hyde and Lisa Sherrard.

As the climate emergency rises before them, Torres Strait Islanders too rise up, suing the government for failing to prevent climate harm. While the court can only hold part of the story, we dance, remember and dream of possible futures with Saibai and her people. This film is their testimony.

Directed by Zac Manuel. Produced by Darcy McKinnon.

An aging jazz singer sets out with his filmmaker son to use artificial intelligence to resurrect the voice of his late father.

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