We’re excited to announce our new Pay the Artists! initiative.

Pay the Artists! is part of a larger effort to create a sustainable ecosystem for nonfiction filmmakers, whose work rarely gets a wide theatrical run. Festivals, more and more, act as a de facto substitute for movie houses. Crowdfunding and foundation grants are often not enough to bring a film into the world.

The True/False PTA program exists as a partial remedy to this problem. In 2014, True/False will begin offering $450 to each feature filmmaker (or filmmaking team) attending the fest in addition to all travel, lodging and food expenses. We hope to grow this fund each year and, eventually, to be able to offer stipends of $1,000 per filmmaker.

This program is a tangible way to invest in filmmakers making great films over the long haul. With it, we aim to seed a movement of supportive institutions who invest in nonfiction filmmaking futures. We hope that, for more new filmmakers, nonfiction is not merely a launching pad to commercial or fiction work but a viable career path.

We see ourselves as a petri dish for trying out ideas, including how to best serve filmmakers. The PTA is an experiment, but also a crucial corrective to the lack of resources for independent filmmakers. While the amounts may seem token at first, we see the PTA as a growing, important commitment to do more care and feeding of the filmmakers we believe in. And if we are not all engaged in making independent filmmaking a sustainable enterprise, we will lose the very voices we exist to champion.

Funds for the PTA program are provided through generous three-year financial commitments from patrons who care deeply about the future of nonfiction filmmaking.

The founding members of the PTA are:

Holly Roberson & John Goldstein
Aggregate
J.A. & H.G Woodruff Jr. Charitable Trust
Pete Kingma & Thom Lambert
Jonathan Murray