Cucalorus Film Foundation, Working Films and DAWG are excited to announce the 2026 Works-in-Progress Lab Cohort! The WiP Lab is an immersive laboratory supporting social justice documentaries with a focus on Black storytelling. The program fosters a tight-knit community of peer support, where facilitators and mentors guide…
Our friends at We Count!, along with Dēmos, and Partners for Dignity and Rights, just released a report that exposes the exploitation underpinning the $50 billion US houseplant industry, The Human Cost of House Plants: Labor Conditions of Florida’s Plant…
We are living through a time defined by intensifying threats to basic rights, safety, and democracy itself. Yet even as political violence rises and divisions deepen, people everywhere are organizing, supporting each other, and imagining a different future. Amplifying stories…
At its heart, Rural Cinema is about harnessing the power of story to drive change. The program trains environmental justice organizers to use film as a tool to bring people together, spark meaningful conversations, and inspire action on the challenges…
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css=""]For a documentary film to make a difference, a solid strategy for audience engagement and strong partnerships are key. Filmmakers often lack time to do this work themselves or the expertise and resources to make an impact campaign happen.…
The Working Films team had the chance to work with Cheris Singleton-Irizary this summer through the Nonprofit Internship Program hosted by the NC Network of Grantmakers. Cheris is a Child Development major at Meredith College and originally from Wilmington, NC.…
How do film screenings build community in rural and small towns? Andy Myers, Director of Campaigns and Strategy, chats with Ava Auen-Ryan, community organizer with Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (Iowa CCI). They discuss how relationship building is at the…
Alex J. Bledsoe
OAKLEAD
OAKLEAD, her debut feature documentary, follows Oakland community members as they fight to protect one another from lead poisoning in their own homes and schools -- and uncover over a century of environmental racism.
Alex J. Bledsoe is a film director, producer and multidisciplinary artist whose work is grounded in healing justice and dismantling exploitative systems, especially related to medical and environmental racism.
Cristián Martin
Cristián
Cristián follows a year-long journey of coming out socially while navigating legal and medical transition. The film traces a nonlinear path from struggle to personal becoming.
Cristián is a documentary storyteller whose work focuses on identity and resilience. His films includes Boricua No Te Quites and post-production support on the NY Emmy-winning series Puerto Rican Voices.
Sekiya Dorsett
20 Years of Longing
20 Years of Longing spans two decades of a Black lesbian couple from Haiti and the Bahamas who must confront migration, religious silence, medical injustice, and their mothers' legacy to build the family they were never meant to have.
Sekiya Dorsett is a GLAAD Award-winning filmmaker and founder of Seabreeze Media Inc., whose nonfiction and hybrid films center Black queer life with emotional rigor, political clarity, and deep care for community memory.
Elodie Edjang
Queer Christians
Queer Christians is a feature-length documentary exploring the intersections and boundaries between faith, race, and love. The film follows a group of queer women of color as they embark on intimate journeys of self-discovery.
Elodie Edjang is a Chicago-based creative focused on making people feel seen, heard, and understood. A third‑culture kid with roots in Cameroon, France, and the American South, she explores community and belonging.
Intercutting the stories of diverse Montanans from a range of lived experiences and perspectives, 
Three working-class women from rural North Carolina become unlikely changemakers in the divided battleground state they call home. Through an intimate, character-centered lens, the film explores the organization's ambitious Theory of Change: a long-term strategy to shift power back into the hands of everyday people by bridging deep racial, economic, and cultural divides. It’s a story of ordinary folks demonstrating extraordinary agency to catalyze action where they live. 
About Rural Cinema
Now in its eight year, we invite nonfiction filmmakers to apply to Impact Kickstart. We will select and support a cohort of filmmakers with impact campaign funds in the range of $10,000 - $20,000, with an anticipated announcement in late 2025 and disbursement in early 2026. In addition to funding, awardees will have access to mentorship and impact strategy support from the Working Films team, towards their impact campaign plans.
The deadline to apply for Impact Kickstart applications is Friday, October 3, 2025 at 11:59 pm ET. Find more details and apply using 
My internship at Working Films has been one of the most fulfilling experiences I’ve ever had. In just eight weeks (that felt way too short), I have learned so much about “films for change” and have personally grown in ways I would’ve never even imagined I’d experience when I first signed up for the opportunity. I understand more about the nonprofit sector, what it means to dedicate yourself to this work, and, most importantly, what’s key to a better world. In just a few words, it is: authentic, raw storytelling.
If you have a moment, I’d love to pass on a gift that was once graciously given to me.
At the start of my internship, I received a folder of materials and a task list from Hannah Hearn, Working Films’ Fellowships Lead, to get me started on the right track. One of my first tasks was to watch a film from their 
The summit brought together Standing Above The Clouds director Jalena Keane-Lee and producer Amber Espinosa-Jones, who shared their vision for the film’s impact. They were joined by Pua Case, one of Mauna Kea Education and Awareness (MKEA) frontline leaders and a protagonist of SATC was there to represent her community’s goals and insight into impact work. Nearly 30 other participants at the summit, all there to share and learn from each other as they created a strategy on how to best use the grant from Impact Kickstart to create social and environmental impact.
A major takeaway from the virtual gathering was that the future generation will need to work on making the work more sustainable, how it’s important to keep personal wellness in mind, because once your body starts to break down it’s harder to commit yourself to the things that really matter. We also had conversations about creating resources for youth to educate them on Mauna Kea in local Hawaiian schools and the power of intergenerational collaboration.
That’s the deeper power of “films for change”—they’re part of a much larger web: storytelling for change. Sharing stories allows us to bridge gaps and educate in ways secondary sources can’t, as the summit did. I felt connected to the women on the Mauna because they were able to tell their stories so effectively and, in turn, I learned about what they were fighting for. The tool that made it happen should be shared throughout the field of social and environmental justice so other communities can utilize it and experience the good it can bring them and their people as well. And, some may ask: well, isn’t that how we got in this mess in the first place, telling stories? This is because, for the longest time, narratives have been spun by oppressors to justify their mistreatment of marginalized groups and the Earth itself. That’s why I didn’t just say storytelling, because, with the wrong motive, storytelling is just propaganda. It’s not a process of expressing oneself and their reality. It is simply a means to an end. Raw, authentic storytelling is about telling your truth. Not the truth, but one personal to you. It allows space for all and commands accountability so that we may share knowledge rather than debate right and wrong. That’s why I feel it is the key to a better world, because its process makes you embody all of the things dominant culture tries to sideline. Audre Lorde, an amazing Black woman, feminist, and author once wrote an essay titled, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” If we are to deconstruct our own systemic torment, we must rework the tools once used to construct it.
Andy: And why do you think working with people is the way to do all of this?
Ava: I think there's no other way to sustain real change over a long period of time. It can be hard sometimes, especially in the political climate we live in. But I think most people are good people who have a lot of shared values and care about the same things. But if we're not talking to each other, like it's really easy to write each other off and that just leads to divisiveness that only benefits the current system we're in. With the pipeline for instance, if we weren't talking to each other, that's what Summit Carbon Solutions, the pipeline company wants, right? Because then they get to put their pipeline in and they get to make billions of dollars each year. We need each other. Humans are pack animals! I think it's the only way we can actually win solutions and then sustain them over time.
Andy: Definitely agree with all of that. Can you share how Iowa CCI uses film to work with people in this way, and bring more folks into the work?
Ava: When we started working with films, we used them kind of sporadically. We didn't have a huge strategy around it, but we really believed in art and moving people and inspiring people, and then we got involved with the Rural Cinema program and tried to make it a lot more intentional. And our main drive was to meet new people and to bring them into the work with different asks. We like to think of all of our asks, as a light, medium, and heavy ask. And coming to a film screening is a light ask. If instead, you just meet someone, and ask them to show up to the Capitol to lobby all day–that’s probably not a good ask, right? Because they just met you. They'd have to drive three hours. Then they have to spend all day with you. It's a lot to ask someone right away. But coming into a film screening in their community is a lot lighter of an ask and it’s a way to keep building that relationship. So that's kind of how we were trying to strategize around using film in Rural Cinema. And that's how we still think about it. At the screenings themselves, we can introduce medium and heavy asks. At one of our film showings, we were knocking doors around that time, which is a big ask–you're going to go knock on a stranger's door and ask them to sign this petition about this thing?!--that's kind of scary for most people. But that was something that we asked people to do at that film screening. We probably wouldn't ask that normally, but it was an easier ask since they had done the light ask of attending the film screening.
In terms of films that we use, there are two main categories that we lean on quite a bit. One is films that have a very clear villain and a very clear movement of people who are trying to prevent something from happening. And with those films, it could be about any issue and you could apply it to the situation that you're in and learn and find similarities. Kind of those David and Goliath stories or organizing stories. The other bucket that we lean on heavily are films that offer an alternative, films that show the vision of what we're fighting for. People in the audience will often see things or make connections that we don't anticipate. Films help show the commonalities we have, even if we don't live in the same place or if we don't look the same, or there's a lot of things we have in common—the enemy is not each other.
Andy: Earlier you had shared that part of why you work with people is because we need everybody or we need at least a lot of people to get our stuff done and build actual movements. Have you ever used films to bring in folks that might not yet be “with you”?
Ava: Yeah, so one good example would be the pipeline fight. There's a lot of reasons to care about this issue and kind of the reason that people got worked up about it at first was property rights and eminent domain. But we don't want to stay just there. We want to expand the issue and talk about how it's impacting the land and our water. And also, you know, climate change and how this is a false energy solution. There's other things that we should be investing in. And we're working primarily in rural Iowa. If you look at Mitchell County, it's overwhelmingly older white folks and probably folks who are more conservative than maybe we are. And so we showed 'LN3: The 7 Teachings of the Anishinaabe Resistance.’ It showed a fight led by indigenous people and in the film they talked a lot about their experience and their perspective and the solutions that indigenous cultures offer to the climate crisis and that's just a different experience that the folks we're working with don’t have. People learn through experience and through repetition, so showing the film was offering someone an experience to learn about something that otherwise, they would have never gotten to see or learn about. And some of these people might not believe in climate change, but they care about the land, or they care about the water. They care about all these things but climate change might not be something they talk about. With this film, the climate change connection was relatively explicit, and it showed we can talk about this and it's going to be okay.
Andy: With Rural Cinema, there is a deeper commitment of time and energy. Y’all have to learn the equipment, you have to do the trainings, and then you do a whole film series. Why did you invest so much time and energy into films as a tool for your organizing?
Ava: It goes back to offering opportunities for all of us to learn. We all always have something to learn and it's a great way to do that. And then two, just going back to those “lighter asks” where we know not all of the different tactics or activities we do fit people's skill set or interest. So this is one that I think pretty broadly, people are comfortable with, they want to learn more. So yeah, it kind of just goes back to its one of those lighter asks that can get people in the door and get them to stick with us long term.
With films, it's also emotional. It's a piece of art. It can move you in a way where a typical conversation may not. There's other “light asks” we could ask people to do and they would do them, but it doesn't have the same emotional reaction or connection that a piece of art can bring. We have lots of creative people on staff. I can be creative at certain times. And also sometimes it's hard. So we're grateful that people create things like this that we can utilize. Especially for staff or member leaders who have been involved, we think about this stuff all day long and it can be really easy to compartmentalize and this reminds you of what's at stake and “the why” behind doing all the work. And I think that's super important to keep going. And I think keeping going is the most important thing we can all do right now.
Check out Colette Ghunim’s website: