LEF is delighted to join the Film Study Center at Harvard University in announcing that Jessica Hankey has been selected as the 2025-26 recipient of the FSC-LEF Fellowship. Filmed on US cross-country trains, Hankey’s film in progress, SUNSET LIMITED, moves through changing American landscapes and social environments where strangers connect across cultural, economic, and technological divides–until their station is called. And where passengers collaborate in front of and behind the camera as boundaries erode inside the train.

Jessica Hankey is a Cambridge-based filmmaker whose projects use improvisation and performance with non-professional actors to consider how we interact with broader power structures. Being in relation with others, intimacy, and formal experimentation animate this work. Hankey attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. She has exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, Vox Populi, and Bowdoin College. Her films have screened at Anthology Film Archives, Slamdance, and the Atlanta Film Festival, and have been reviewed in Artforum, Glasstire, and the Chart. She co-edited the anthology Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance (MIT Press 2023) and is the publisher of Orbis Editions, an artist-run small press.

The FSC-LEF Fellowship is awarded annually to one Boston-area nonfiction filmmaker not currently affiliated with Harvard. The filmmaker receives a $15,000 grant (jointly funded by FSC and LEF Foundation), access to FSC production and post-production equipment, and the opportunity to participate in Harvard FSC work-in-progress screenings, workshops, and other activities.

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LEF is delighted to join the Harvard Film Study Center in announcing that Riccardo Giacconi has been selected as the 2024-25 recipient of the Film Study Center-LEF Foundation Fellowship. Giacconi’s film in progress, Affidavit, follows a 30-year-old radio producer as she records voices and sounds in a small rural village, summoning the distant memory of a violent act that the local community still grapples with. Through her microphones, the radio producer facilitates a sort of séance, where the past is brought to the surface through conversations and by listening to soundscapes at various crime scenes as if searching for phantom radiation that still resonates in the air. The film aims to evoke the practice of radio-making in the form of a portrait within a portrait.

Riccardo Giacconi is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher. He studied fine arts at IUAV University in Venice and received a PhD from Leiden University. His work has been exhibited in various festivals and venues, including the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Visions du Réel and FID Marseille, where he won the Grand Prix of the International Competition in 2015. His most recent film, Giganti Rosse, premiered at the Torino Film Festival, where it was awarded Best Italian Documentary in 2023. He co-founded the collective listening festival Helicotrema and the audio storytelling studio Botafuego. Giacconi is Professor of the Practice at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston.

The FSC-LEF Fellowship is awarded annually to one Boston-area nonfiction filmmaker not currently affiliated with Harvard. The filmmaker receives a $10,000 grant (jointly funded by FSC and LEF Foundation), access to FSC production and post-production equipment, and the opportunity to participate in Harvard FSC work-in-progress screenings, workshops, and other activities.

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LEF joins the Harvard Film Study Center in announcing that Milton Guillén has been selected as the 2023–24 recipient of the Film Study Center-LEF Foundation Fellowship with his project “My Skin and I.”

The FSC-LEF Fellowship, open to Boston-area nonfiction directors who are not currently affiliated with Harvard, aims to foster connections between Harvard filmmakers and those in the surrounding filmmaker community.

One filmmaker per academic year receives a $10,000 grant (jointly funded by FSC and LEF Foundation), access to FSC production and post-production equipment, and the opportunity to participate in the Harvard FSC community through work-in-progress screenings, workshops, and other activities. Fellowship applications are accepted in the January round of the LEF Moving Image Fund Production and Post-production grant cycle and the final recipient of the FSC-LEF Fellowship is selected by the Film Study Center.

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LEF’s Moving Image Fund is now accepting letters of inquiry for projects in Production and Post-production.

A maximum of seven (7) grants of $15,000 each will be awarded to projects in the Production phase, and a maximum of four (4) grants of $25,000 each will be awarded to projects in the Post-production phase during LEF’s major grants review. Please note that in order to be eligible for Post-production support, the project for which you are applying must have received previous LEF support.

Learn more about guidelines and eligibility by reading the full announcement. Letters of Inquiry can completed through LEF’s Submittable.

Submitting a MIF letter of inquiry is also an opportunity to express interest in being considered for the Harvard FSC-LEF Fellowship, an opportunity for Boston-area filmmakers to receive a jointly-funded $10,000 grant, access to FSC’s pool of production and post-production equipment, and participation in the Harvard FSC community through work-in-progress screenings, workshops, and other activities. Find out more about this opportunity on our website.

To learn more about these upcoming opportunities, LEF staff will be hosting a virtual info session on Zoom from 1:00 – 2:00pm ET on Monday, December 5. Register for the info session here.

An Update to MIF Applications

This year, in a continued effort to standardize the application process for filmmakers who may be applying to multiple funds, LEF has used the latest Nonfiction Core Application as a template to update the Moving Image Fund LOI and Full Application forms. The LEF letter of inquiry form now includes an additional 2022 question drawn from the updated Nonfiction Core Application and clarifying language about existing LEF questions. The MIF full application will further reflect updated and added questions, for which you can get an initial sense by visiting the Nonfiction Core Application website.

Our hope is that any updates and additional questions in our forms will provide the opportunity for applicants to expand upon their approaches to access, accountability, and community care in their projects.

Announcing LEF’s Fall Grant Cycle

LEF is excited to announce that our grant cycle to support projects in Pre-production and Early Development, which historically included a deadline in mid-June and a decision in late July, is shifting to slightly later in the year.

The next grant cycle will have a deadline on August 7, 2023 with a decision in early October. Mark your calendars!

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The LEF Foundation has awarded 11 Moving Image Fund grants totaling $205,000 in support of feature-length documentary works by New England-based filmmakers.

The LEF Moving Image Fund invests in feature-length documentary films that demonstrate excellence in technique, strong storytelling ability, and originality of artistic vision and voice. The most recent round of awards includes seven grants of $15,000 to projects at the Production stage and four grants of $25,000 to projects at the Post-production stage. 

This year’s selected films represent a chorus of perspectives questioning how best to celebrate, conserve, and connect with the past and present while forging ahead into an unwritten future. 

“It’s moving to see the diversity of work being made by independent documentary filmmakers in the region,” said Lyda Kuth, Executive Director. “This year we saw themes of legacy, community, and transformation dealt with through a range of films, some of which address environmentalism, disability, public education, and even wastewater treatment.”

Production

• COSMIC CODA (dir./prod. Mary-Jane Doherty)
• Kaksori! (dir. Shirley Kim-Ryu, Eben Portnoy; prod. Kim-Ryu, Portnoy, Marcela Santibañez)
• King Luck (dir. Emily Graham-Handley; prod. Graham-Handley, Tom Donahue)
• My Disability Roadmap (dir. Dan Habib, Samuel Habib; prod. Dan Habib)
• Requiem for a River (dir. Mary Patierno; prod. Patierno, Hugo Pérez)
• The Source of Life (Te Puna Ora) (dir. Virginie Tetoofa; prod. Kiran Jandu, Riham Ezzaldeen, Ciara Lacy)
• Untitled Wastewater Documentary (dir. Kaitlyn Schwalje, Alex Wolf Lewis; prod. Rebecca Stern, Justin Levy)

Post-production

• Adam’s Apple (dir. Amy Jenkins)
• Cairo, IL Project (working title) (dir. Lisa Marie Malloy, JP Sniadecki, Ray Whitaker; prod. Karin Chien, Wynne Hannan)
• Israelism (dir. Eric Axelman, Sam Eilertsen; prod. Axelman, Daniel Chalfen)
• School District (dir. Leigh Morfoot, Jason Morfoot; prod. Leigh Morfoot)

At LEF’s January 2022 deadline for Production and Post-production, 67 eligible letters of inquiry were evaluated by a group of three New England-based filmmakers serving as peer readers, in addition to LEF staff. 

“This opportunity for local filmmakers to engage with the work being made by their colleagues is both inspiring and builds a sense of community that LEF looks to play a role in creating,” said Kuth.

Of these initial inquiries, 28 projects that most aligned with LEF’s funding criteria were invited by LEF staff to submit a full application, including 17 finalists in Production and 11 finalists in Post-production. All 28 full applications were then evaluated by a peer review panel made up of filmmakers and professionals from across the U.S. who represent a diversity of perspectives on documentary. Peer reviewers remain anonymous and change at every round. While LEF has typically convened each year’s Moving Image Fund panelists for an in-person review meeting each May, LEF hosted an all-virtual panel review process for a third consecutive year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“We were honored to learn about every project shared with LEF during this spring grant cycle, and to invite feedback from a group of thoughtful and talented peer reviewers at both the letter of inquiry stage and the full application stage,” said LEF Program Director Gen Carmel. “We will make that feedback available for applicants to hear by phone, and we hope that all of the filmmakers who applied might take advantage of this opportunity to receive in-kind support for their works-in-progress, regardless of the grant decision.”  

In addition to this group of grantees, LEF also awarded $47,500 to 12 projects in Early Development and Pre-production earlier in the fiscal year. In total, LEF will be distributing $252,500 in funding to documentary productions over the course of its 2021-22 fiscal year. 

Earlier today, LEF joined the Harvard Film Study Center in announcing that Amy Jenkins has been selected as the 2022-23 recipient of the Film Study Center-LEF Foundation Fellowship with her project “Adam’s Apple.” The FSC-LEF Fellowship, open to Boston-area nonfiction directors who are not currently affiliated with Harvard, aims to foster connections between Harvard filmmakers and those in the surrounding filmmaker community. One filmmaker per academic year receives a $10,000 grant (jointly funded by FSC and LEF Foundation), access to FSC production and post-production equipment, and the opportunity to participate in the Harvard FSC community through work-in-progress screenings, workshops, and other activities. Fellowship applications are accepted in the January round of the LEF Moving Image Fund Production and Post-production grant cycle and the final recipient of the FSC-LEF Fellowship is selected by the Film Study Center. See the full announcement here.

The next Moving Image Fund grant deadline is Friday, June 3, 2022 for New England-based directors and producers seeking Pre-production and Early Development support for feature-length documentaries. Please check LEF’s website for details regarding LEF Moving Image Fund guidelines and eligibility. For more information on the Foundation or its funded projects, please contact Program Officer Matthew LaPaglia at matthew@lef-foundation.org.

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The LEF Foundation has awarded 10 Moving Image Fund grants totaling $190,000 in support of feature-length documentary works by New England-based filmmakers.

The LEF Moving Image Fund invests in feature-length documentary films that demonstrate excellence in technique, strong storytelling ability, and originality of artistic vision and voice. The most recent round of awards includes six grants of $15,000 to projects at the Production stage, and four grants of $25,000 to projects at the Post-production stage.

“Considering the increased challenges that independent filmmakers continue to face in 2021,” said LEF Executive Director Lyda Kuth, “we are unwavering in our commitment to the Moving Image Fund, as a longstanding and unique regional grant program for New England-based filmmakers, which offers early and ongoing funding for feature documentaries through a peer review evaluation process. ”

At LEF’s January 2021 deadline for Production and Post-production, 72 eligible letters of inquiry were evaluated by a group of three New England-based filmmakers serving as peer readers, in addition to LEF staff. Of these initial inquiries, 30 projects that most aligned with LEF’s funding criteria were invited by LEF staff to submit a full application, including 22 finalists in Production and 8 finalists in Post-production. All 30 full applications were then evaluated by a peer review panel made up of filmmakers and professionals from across the U.S. who represent a diversity of perspectives on documentary. Peer reviewers remain anonymous, and change at every round. While LEF typically convenes each year’s Moving Image Fund panelists for an in-person review meeting each May, LEF altered its plans for a second consecutive year due to the COVID-19 pandemic by convening an all-virtual panel review process.

About the most recent round of Production and Post-production grants awarded, LEF Program Officer Gen Carmel shared, “The projects supported at this stage represent only a glimpse of the visionary filmmakers and artists who live and work in New England, working across archival, experimental, hybrid, observational, personal, and political filmmaking traditions in documentary film. While not all applicants were able to be supported, we were honored to learn about every project shared with LEF, and to invite feedback from a group of thoughtful and talented peer reviewers, which we will make available for applicants to hear by phone. We hope that all of the filmmakers

who applied at this stage will continue to stay in touch with LEF as not only a potential funder, but also a resource for information and encouragement, to make the filmmaking process a little less isolating through these difficult times.”

In addition to this group of grantees, LEF also awarded $50,000 to 12 projects in Early Development and Pre-production earlier in the fiscal year. In total, LEF will be distributing $240,000 in funding to documentary productions over the course of its 2021 fiscal year.

Additionally, earlier today, LEF joined the Harvard Film Study Center in announcing that Khary Saeed Jones has been selected as the 2021-22 recipient of the Film Study Center-LEF Foundation Fellowship with his project “Night Fight”. The FSC-LEF Fellowship, open to Boston-area nonfiction directors who are not currently affiliated with Harvard, aims to foster connections between Harvard filmmakers and those in the surrounding filmmaker community. One filmmaker per academic year receives a $10,000 grant (jointly funded by FSC and LEF Foundation), access to FSC production and post-production equipment, and the opportunity to participate in the Harvard FSC community through work-in-progress screenings, workshops, and other activities. Fellowship applications are accepted in the January round of the LEF Moving Image Fund Production and Post-production grant cycle and the final recipient of the FSC-LEF Fellowship is selected by the Film Study Center. See the full announcement here.

See the full MIF announcement.

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