Nov 8, 2021

Journalist Ronan Farrow and “Life, Animated” director Roger Ross Williams will receive special honorary awards from the International Documentary Association (IDA) as part of this year’s upcoming IDA Documentary Awards. The IDA Awards, now in their 37th year, will also recognize editor and producer Jean Tsien, “Landfall” director Cecilia Aldarondo and “Writing With Fire” team Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh. Farrow will be awarded with the Truth to Power Award, Williams will receive the Career Achievement prize, Tsien will receive the Pioneer Award, Aldarondo get the Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award and Thomas and Ghosh will share the Courage Under Fire Award. The 2021 awards ceremony will take place Saturday, Feb. 5, 2022 at Paramount Studios. The nominees for all IDA Awards categories will be revealed next week on Monday, Nov. 15, 2021. Past honorees of the IDA’s honorary awards include Stanley Nelson, Robert Redford, Freida Lee Mock, Barbara Kopple, Laura Poitras, David France, Christiane Amanpour, Natalia Almada, Michael Apted, Agnès Varda and Jonas Mekas. “As someone who for a long time felt like an outsider, It’s the greatest honor to be recognized by an organization of my peers. Thank you IDA for giving a voice to BIPOC creators and production companies,” Williams said in a statement. “I’m an admirer of the International Documentary Association’s work championing filmmakers’ first amendment rights and I so appreciate that they’ve chosen to recognize Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes,” Farrow said. “This series wouldn’t exist without Nancy Abraham, Lisa Heller and their team at HBO—or our filmmakers, Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, and the many creative people they worked alongside at World of Wonder. And the reporting in it wouldn’t have seen the light of day without the sources who put so much on the line to out the truth.” The 2021 IDA Documentary Awards is sponsored by Participant and SHOWTIME® Documentary Films.