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The Better Angels Lavine Fellowship Application is open until July 19 at 11:59PST. Apply now.
Established in 2021, The Better Angels Lavine Fellowship supports compelling documentaries that represent the full range of U.S. history and are well-positioned to benefit from customized membership. The fellowship creates a community where filmmakers gain expertise from seasoned industry leaders and share skills to collectively deepen their craft.
The Fellowship is focused on feature-length projects in post-production and offers focused workshops and mentorship that support their completion and distribution. Each selected film receives a $5,000 prize, and filmmakers meet in a virtual cohort setting over the course of several months to advance their projects to the next stage.
The Better Angels Lavine Fellowship is made possible by The Better Angels Society and a generous gift from Jeannie and Jonathan Lavine, and is a companion program of The Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film. Fellows are invited to attend the annual Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film awards ceremony, which welcomes experts from across the industry. Fellows are highly encouraged to submit to this prize in future years.
Past cohorts have participated in workshops focused on packaging and pitching films, archival producing, marketing and distribution, self-distribution, and the PBS programming process. In 2025, workshop mentors included PBS Executive Sylvia Bugg, Distribution Executive Alexandra Hannibal, Distribution Advocates’ Co-founder Amy Hobby, Archival Producer Stephanie Jenkins, Producer Caroline Waterlow, and other industry experts.
Participants have also worked one-on-one with editing mentors who offer targeted feedback on rough and fine cuts of their films. In 2025, editing mentors included Salimah El-Amin (The Vietnam War), Amy Foote (Fauci), Flavia de Souza (Eyes on the Prize II) and Tyler Walk (Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus).
Eligibility:
- Your film must focus on an American historical subject, issue, or person within a time frame occurring at least twenty years prior to submission (prior to 2006) and must present a variety of perspectives grounded in extensive and thorough research. The majority of the film must be historically focused to qualify. We invite submissions employing a broad range of storytelling devices and archival materials, which should be integral to the story.
- Applicants should submit a 20-minute continuous sample; the sample can be from a rough or fine cut of the feature-length project.
- Short films are ineligible.
- Submissions must follow journalistic standards and consider multiple perspectives. Industrial, promotional, “advertorial”, advocacy, and instructional films are ineligible. No product placement or paid messaging is permitted. If a submission uses AI, the project must identify when and where AI is used and adhere to the Archival Producers Alliance’s Best Practices for Use of Generative AI.
- A film previously submitted to the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film can be submitted to the Fellowship if it was not previously awarded.