The LEF Foundation has awarded 13 Moving Image Fund grants totaling $52,500 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, a resonant story or idea, and originality of artistic vision and voice. The most recent round of awards includes eight grants of $5,000 to projects at the Pre-production stage and five grants of $2,500 to projects at the Early Development stage.
The projects this round reflect on our current moment: often precipitous, a turning point, a possibility for new directions. The cohort includes imaginative works that layer artifice onto the real to reveal larger truths, films that utilize verite modes to patiently observe the workings of life in front of the camera, and ambitious projects tracing the slow progress of thoughts and actions over time.
PRE-PRODUCTION
Feu de Lune
Directed by Dominic Yarabe
Produced by Eliza Soros
Feu de Lune follows two ten-year old twins in a rural West African village as they reenact an epic myth to preserve their community’s fading oral histories. But the spell is broken when their play reveals a buried secret—a civil conflict largely erased from national memory.
Green Light
Directed by Anna Barsan
Produced by Paige Wood, Kate Levy
Green Light follows the expansion of a video surveillance network in Detroit, investigating the promises of public safety while probing the tensions between visibility and control. Through the lens of a city under constant watch, the film asks: Who feels safe? Who is seen? And what remains beyond the camera’s gaze?
Letters of Elsewhere
Directed by Abhi Indrekar
Produced by Dakxin Chhara, Michaela Henry
Caught in immigration limbo in America, a filmmaker unable to return home to Chharanagar turns his lens on the stillness around him—capturing the beauty, grief, and ghosts of exile—while composing poetic letters to the homeland he can only now visit through memory.
Rompío Fuente en la Noche (Water Breaks at Night)
Directed and Produced by Rosalyn Negrón
Intimate portraits of pregnant women in Vieques, a Puerto Rican island without a hospital, once a site of U.S. military exercises. As they prepare for childbirth, they hope for safe births amid the lingering threats of contamination and hurricanes. For them, bringing new life into Vieques is both a blessing and an act of defiance.
The Eye of Eternity
Directed and Produced by Matteo Moretti
Three Shakers sustain a centuries-old faith as their Maine village becomes a haven for seekers—a former Shaker, Franciscan friars, and other kindred spirits. In a world that often writes them off as relics, this documentary offers a rare, present-tense portrait of belief, belonging, and the quiet strength it takes to carry a fragile tradition into an uncertain future.
The Low Season
Directed by Bernardo Ruiz
Produced by Bernardo Ruiz, Andrea Patiño Contreras
A woman from the future arrives in present day Queens, New York in order to lead immigrant families to safety as bounty hunters prey on them.
The sea will bring the miracle
Directed by Felipe Esparza Pérez
Produced by Lady Vinces Cruz
Carmen is a young widow living in Puerto Eten, a town marked by state neglect. When Li Guang, a shipwrecked Chinese fisherman, is rescued and secretly protected by Carmen, his arrival coincides with alleged miraculous apparitions of the Divine Child wrongly attributed to Aurelio, Carmen’s young son. She must face the pressure of a community that sees in her son a divine sign, while struggling to protect him from the fanaticism and growing tensions in the village.
The Swimmer
Directed and Produced by Sara Jordenö
“Tell your story. Tell it again. Tell it anyway.” Arash, an Afghan refugee and aspiring competitive swimmer, asks Sara, a filmmaker, to make a film about his life in limbo, and his dream deferred. 7 years later, Arash disappears. Together with Ahmad, an actor, Sara attempts to re-tell Arash’s story in his absence. A feverishly surreal imagined conversation between a documentarian and their participant, The SWIMMER asks hard questions about the labor and accountability of the artist-as-witness.
EARLY DEVELOPMENT
98 Days
Directed by Cashmere Jasmine
Produced by Andy Fraser, Cashmere Jasmine, RJ Dawson
98 Days is a hybrid documentary tracing activist-filmmaker RJ Dawson’s journey from the 2020 Grand Park occupation where Black Unity organizers and unhoused residents clashed with police and internal divisions to his current work with the Center of Independent Living Storytellers Initiative, a disability justice media project confronting 2025’s attacks on healthcare access.
Ancestral Days
Directed by Bronte Stahl
Produced 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, ironies and absurdities emerge and invite a reflection on gentrification, immigration and the act of remaining.
Combat Zones (Working Title)
Directed by Stephen Wardell
Produced by Matthew Hipps
When a movie theater is removed from a community, what is left behind? To better understand the contemporary landscape of queer public space, we trace the remains of X-rated movie theaters in Boston and reanimate the fantasies that populated them.
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
Directed and Produced by Asha Tamirisa
“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” is an experimental documentary that explores wildfire smoke as a means for how to sense and make sense of the climate crises. Smoke is quickly becoming a quotidian aspect of human life as wildfires proliferate in many parts of the world. Drawing from interviews, sensory ethnographic methodologies, and materialist media practices, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” will allow for critical and affective engagement with this growing transnational dilemma.
Writing for My Mother
Directed and Produced by Natalie Pattillo
WRITING FOR MY MOTHER is a feature-length documentary that examines the declining literacy rates in the United States. Director Natalie Pattillo—whose mother faces literacy challenges—is uplifting the heartfelt and timely stories of adult learners and their children, as well as the advocates fighting for the right to read, write, and vote.
At LEF’s August deadline for Pre-production and Early Development, 52 eligible applications were received from filmmakers working throughout New England. Three peer readers from the local filmmaking community who represent a diversity of perspectives on documentary were invited to review, discuss, and make recommendations on the applications. These peer evaluations informed LEF staff’s final grant decisions.
“Independent filmmakers are a resilient bunch who know they haven’t chosen a straight-forward path,” said Lyda Kuth, LEF Executive Director. “At this moment, they persevere to make work despite widespread cuts to federal funding and fewer opportunities to show their work publicly. At LEF, we see this first-hand, as evidenced by the wealth of documentary projects that continue to be made here in New England. We value their contribution and feel lucky to have them here.”
This is the sixth year that the Moving Image Fund has included support at the Early Development stage, giving initial seed funding to filmmakers who have not yet had a chance to shoot or edit sample footage for their current projects.
“Our production team is grateful for this critical, early support from LEF as we undertake an ambitious project in challenging times for independent film,” said grantee Andrea Patiño Contreras.
“LEF’s support has made it possible for me to keep creating independent, creative nonfiction work that would otherwise be nearly impossible to sustain,” said grantee Anna Barsan. “In a challenging funding and political landscape, they’ve been steady, generous, and truly engaged with artists and their work.”
All applicants who applied for LEF funding for either Pre-production or Early Development will have the option to receive review notes from staff to learn how their proposals were evaluated by the peer reviewers and to ask any questions.
“As a regional funder, LEF New England has the privilege of learning about a wide array of new feature-length nonfiction films made by a diverse community of New England directors and producers who are just beginning to seek funds for their projects,” said LEF Program Director Gen Carmel. “Because of our local scale and position as the first source of grant support for many projects, we know how crucial it is to be able to share constructive peer review feedback with all of the filmmakers who request it at this stage.”
In addition to this group of grantees, LEF will also award $270,000 to 12 projects in Production and Post-production later in the fiscal year, following the next January 2025 application deadline. In total, LEF plans to distribute $322,500 in funding to documentary productions over the course of its 2026 fiscal year.
The next Moving Image Fund grant deadline will be Friday, January 16, 2026 for New England-based directors and producers seeking Production and Post-production support for feature-length documentaries.
You can find more details regarding LEF Moving Image Fund guidelines and eligibility on our website.
You can subscribe to LEF’s mailing list to receive a monthly newsletter and the latest updates about grantee news, filmmaker opportunities, and calls for Moving Image Fund submissions. For more information on the Foundation or its funded projects, please contact Program Officer Matthew LaPaglia at matthew@lef-foundation.org.
