EXCLUSIVE: The International Documentary Association has announced the full lineup for Getting Real ’26, its upcoming biennial conference “on the art and industry of documentary filmmaking.”
The event, set to unfold in person in Los Angeles from July 20-23 and globally online, will feature keynote addresses by Mandy Chang, CEO, UK Documentary Film Council, and Petna Katondolo, filmmaker and artistic director, Yole!Africa. A panel discussion on the State of the Business will feature Sam Denby (chief content officer of the Nebula streaming service and founder of Wendover Productions) and Sohini Sengupta (cofounder of Doverlane), among others.
Two panels promise candid stories of documentary production, some of them disturbing. “Stories We Do Not Tell,” facilitated by Tracy Rector, is “built from accounts of exploitation, bad faith, and outright abuse submitted by documentary filmmakers and carefully reviewed by IDA.” It will explore “private, anonymous experiences of our industry colleagues read aloud, organized into categories of harm that reveal the systemic patterns behind individual cases.”
Filmmaker Alan Berliner
Amanda Edwards/WireImage
In the panel “Here’s What Really Happened,” acclaimed filmmaker Alan Berliner will reveal how his documentary Letters to the Editor – on which he spent decades – was scuttled by “a major legal challenge.” The film had already premiered at festivals and was set for an HBO broadcast before it got derailed. “Five years after the dust settled, he is ready to talk about it publicly for the first time,” notes the Getting Real ’26 program.
This year’s Getting Real program is centered around the theme Terms of Service, “focusing on investment, inspiration, and impact.” The conference is open to the public; find more information here.
Getting Real ’24
IDA
“Rather than simply restating the industry’s many challenges,” states a release, “Getting Real’s program is organized around what filmmakers are doing in response—the tactics, models, and alliances being built in practice—and the conversations usually too risky or too raw to have anywhere else.” The IDA notes the conference “gathers the industry’s most powerful players and visionary filmmakers, including editors, producers, funders, studios and streaming platforms — for candid, revealing conversations on the most pressing issues facing the field.”
Getting Real ’26 is programmed by Abby Sun, Meghan Monsour, and Lisa Valencia-Svensson. Below are some of the program highlights:
Keynote speeches by Mandy Chang, CEO, UK Documentary Film Council, and Petna Katondolo, Filmmaker and Artistic Director, Yole!Africa.
State of the Business, featuring Sam Denby (Nebula, Wendover Productions), Sohini Sengupta (Doverlane), and more. Consolidation is tightening, commissioning slots are shrinking, and the path to an audience runs through fewer and fewer gatekeepers. But audiences for documentaries are not shrinking, and a whole world of revenue models, audience development, and creative independence exists outside the broadcaster-commissioner pipeline. The goal of this conversation isn’t another reckoning with decline. It’s a harder one: what are we actually measuring, and what is the real upside?
Here’s What Really Happened, featuring Alan Berliner. For decades one of our field’s most beloved essayists—whose obsessive, first-person archives of family, memory, and daily life have made him a quiet touchstone for generations of nonfiction filmmakers—Berliner spent forty years collecting newspaper photographs and six years editing them into a film, Letters to the Editor. It premiered at top festivals and landed a confirmed HBO broadcast — and then a major legal challenge stopped it cold. Five years after the dust settled, he is ready to talk about it publicly for the first time.
Stories We Do Not Tell, facilitated by Tracy Rector. Built from accounts of exploitation, bad faith, and outright abuse submitted by documentary filmmakers and carefully reviewed by IDA, we will hear the private, anonymous experiences of our industry colleagues read aloud, organized into categories of harm that reveal the systemic patterns behind individual cases. A panel of legal and industry experts will respond to what they hear. The goal is not catharsis alone. It is to make sure that no one in the room — filmmaker or gatekeeper — can walk away without knowing the truth of what is happening in our field.
Lights, Coffee, Action!, a breakfast networking session for filmmakers, funders and distributors. The one forum that operates outside the conference’s “no-pitch zone,” Lights, Coffee, Action! brings together nearly fifty foundations, funds, public media organizations, festivals, broadcasters, and distributors. Attendees rotate to a new table every twenty minutes, meeting multiple kinds of supporters and learning directly what each is looking to fund. A simultaneous version runs on the virtual platform.
–Confirmed participants include AXS Film Fund, BAVC Media, Big Sky Film Institute, Black Public Media, CAAM, California Film Institute / DocLands, Catapult Film Fund, Chicken & Egg Pictures, CPH:DOX, DCTV, Doc Society, Docs in Progress, Double Exposure, Film Independent, Firelight Media, GBH, Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, HotDocs, ITVS, the Jewish Film Institute, Kartemquin Films, Latino Public Broadcasting, the LEF Foundation, Louverture Films, Multitude Films, New Day Films, NPR, The New York Times Op-Docs, Points North Institute, POV, SFFILM, Shine Global, the Southern Documentary Fund, Sundance (Catalyst, Documentary Film Program, and Ignite), The Berkeley Film Foundation, The Film Collaborative, TIFF, Video Project, Visual Communications, and more.
If You Build It: Distribution and Exhibition, featuring Amy Hobby (DistributionAdvocates), Ondrej Kamenicky (One World Festival), Peter Ambrosio (Lumiere Cinema), Chloe Genga (Bigger Motion). In cities and towns from Los Angeles to Nairobi to Prague, filmmakers, festivals, and exhibition spaces are building rooms and pathways for audiences to gather around documentary, cross-pollinate, and create the kind of local trust no algorithm can manufacture. This panel brings together organizations doing exactly that: a festival that has expanded human rights documentary into dozens of cities with offshoots around the world; a Pan-African distribution company bringing African cinema back to the continent; the largest community media center in the U.S.; and a scrappy worker-owned LA arthouse that survived an eviction and kept its doors open.
Technologies of Place-Keeping with Black Film Assembly, featuring Ben Caldwell (KAOS Network, LA), Skira Martinez (CIELO galleries/studio, LA), Petna Ndaliko Katondolo (Yole!Africa, Goma, DRC) and Matazi Weathers (Black Film Assembly). Black Film Assembly is a living mycelium of Black filmmakers, programmers, educators, and storytellers rooted in Los Angeles and reaching across the diaspora. Attendees are invited into the conversation as formational archival practice: sharing history, recognizing realities, dreaming futures, and gathering resources for the times to come.
The Public Television Puzzle, featuring Emily Abi-Kheirs (Programming Manager at GBH and PTPA Board Member) and Nicole Tsien. National PBS is not the whole story. Despite reports to the contrary, public television in the U.S. remains a vital pathway for documentary distribution — but it is a vast, decentralized system. Untangle the full public media ecosystem, tracing the real trajectories of real films to map the multiple entry points that exist. Attendees leave with a practical sense of how to find their own path.
Getting Real will also include fireside chats with Tikkun Olam Productions, Set Hernandez and Leonard Cortana; sessions on AI, coalition politics, transitional justice, and antitrust; workshops, breakout sessions, gatherings, and the return of the participatory “Build Your Own Breakout Session.”