Doc Society Launches $2.7M Love & Rockets Fund

Doc Society has launched the Love & Rockets Fund, a $2.7 million international grant program for cinematic non-fiction features it describes as "in service of better futures." The fund opens with commitments running through mid-2028 and lifts the London-based non-profit's annual film spend above $4 million.

The fund will award non-recoupable grants of up to $150,000 per project, with additional money available for distribution and audience engagement of supported films.

Doc Society framed the initiative as a response to an "age of unchecked capitalism, rising authoritarianism and growing nationalism," and a need for films that "deconstruct architectures of power, illustrate alternate realities and create connection."

"Doc Society is all in on fighting fascism," the organization said in a statement. "With creative collaboration, dedicated craft, joyous partying and fierce camaraderie to help bring these visions of freedom, civil and human rights to screens. Whether part of a global movement, national reckoning or local transformation."

Alongside the announcement, Doc Society unveiled the first six supported projects, including an untitled feature about the rise of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

The inaugural grantees

"Untitled New York Project," directed and produced by Julia Bacha and produced by Suhad Babaa, Tiffany Fisher-Love and Rula Salameh, follows a backbench New York State Assembly member who launches a long-shot bid for mayor of New York City, vowing to make life more affordable. As the establishment attempts to weaponize his long-standing commitment to Palestinian rights, a movement is galvanized that brings about "one of the greatest political reckonings in American history," according to the film's description.

"Our Land" comes from director Lucrecia Martel, produced by Benjamin Domenech, Santiago Gallelli, Matias Roveda, Joselyn Barnes, Javier Leoz and Julio Chavezmontes. In 2009, a man and two armed accomplices claiming ownership of land tried to evict members of the Indigenous community of Chuschagasta in northern Argentina, killing the community's leader, Javier Chocobar. The murder was caught on video. Court proceedings opened only in 2018, after nine years of protests, and the killers remained free throughout. The film combines community voices and photographs with courtroom footage to examine the colonial history and state-sanctioned land dispossession behind the crime.

"How to be a Woman in Iran," directed by Mahnaz Mohammadi and Vanessa Bowles and executive produced by Ben de Pear, Maziar Bahari and Nevine Mabro, draws on an archive secretly filmed over two decades. Exiled filmmaker Mohammadi retraces the rise of Iran's women's movement and its eventual suppression, charting her own path through surveillance, imprisonment and resistance.

"Blackest Ever Black," directed by Roisin Agnew and produced by Alison Millar, Callum Roberts, Diane Becker, Melanie Miller and Roisin Geraghty, is now in production. The Irish hybrid docucomedy, starring Stephen Rea and Killian Sunderman, follows a film crew whose attempt to make a film about data centres descends into chaos, putting accepted truths about tech and documentary filmmaking on the line.

"With Time," directed by Noah Schaumus and Brit Fryer and produced by Jesse Miller, blends realism with fantasy. It follows an intergenerational group of trans people, who have lived through shifting tides of acceptance and backlash, as they gather in a storytelling workshop.

The sixth project, an "Untitled Watermelon Pictures Project," remains undisclosed.

Doc Society, formed in 2005 and formerly known as BRITDOC, operates from the U.K. and New York. The Love & Rockets Fund's first slate signals where the organization sees documentary heading: toward films made as explicit instruments of political and social transformation, with the money to match.