Mountainfilm Spotlights Global Stories with 2025 Commitment Grants

Mountainfilm Spotlights Global Stories with 2025 Commitment Grants

Telluride, Colorado (September 9, 2025) – Mountainfilm is proud to announce this year’s slate of Commitment Grantees, reflecting a global focus with projects spanning the Arctic Circle, the Middle East, Texas, and our home on Colorado’s Western Slope. Among the recipients are both Mountainfilm alumni and first-time grantees, showcasing an exciting mix of creative visions and voices.

This year, interest hit an all-time high, with the largest applicant pool to date. The grants committee faced the welcome challenge of selecting from a remarkably strong list of documentary projects. This year, Mountainfilm will distribute $60,000 to 25 projects through the 2025 Commitment Grant, with one additional film named the Emerging Filmmaker Fellow. Funding for this program is provided by Mountainfilm’s Filmmaker Fund, Borsecnik/Weil Family and Jess Stevens and Stephen Pollard in honor of the life of Isabella de la Houssaye.

“It’s always an exciting time of year to review the Commitment Grant projects. We receive so many inspiring and important applications that already spark curiosity and a desire for change. This year’s grant winners are no different, and we’re grateful to be in a position to support their work. said Lauren Howie, Mountainfilm’s Program Manager.

Launched in 2010, the Commitment Grant initiative helps documentary storytellers move projects forward. Many grantees have later premiered at Mountainfilm, creating some of the festival’s most memorable screenings. Previous projects supported by the Commitment Grant include Remaining Native by Paige Bethmann; Old Man Lightning by Dawn Kish; An Accidental Life by Henna Taylor; Apayauq by Zeppelin Zeerip; Desert Angel by Vincent Deluca; Public Defender by Andrea Kalin; The Holly by Julian Rubinstein; Hunger Ward by Skye Fitzgerald; Impossible Town by Meg Griffiths and Scott Faris; Patrol by Brad Allgood; and Placekeepers by Robert Hope, to name just a few.

The 2025 Commitment Grant winners are:

A New Inferno
Jonathan Pickett & Nita Blum
Filmed during the hottest weeks of Phoenix, Arizona’s summer heatwave, A New Inferno follows paramedics as they race to save the lives of heatstroke victims using a radical new treatment: ice immersion therapy.

American Dream
Daniel Dubiecki
On September 10, 2024, false claims during the presidential debate that Haitian migrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, thrust this small city of 58,000 into the national spotlight. American Dream follows the breadcrumbs to ground zero where the story began, revealing a town divided yet resilient, a microcosm of America built on immigration and the people who call it home.

Beneath the Concrete
Gabriella Canal
In a city shaped by concrete and steel, landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson reimagines New York City as it once was, a thriving natural ecosystem and as it could be again, offering a visionary blueprint to confront climate change. 

Buckskin
Mars Verrone
An experimental portrait of the filmmaker’s grandfather: Carroll B. Williams, a groundbreaking African American forester, reflecting on his work and legacy in the twilight of his life. 

Companion of the Setting Sun
Isabela Zawistowska
Companion of the Setting Sun follows 86-year-old chinampera Doña Susana and scientist Diana Mendoza fighting to protect Lake Xochimilco’s fragile ecosystem. As ancestral farming and axolotls vanish, their story reveals an intergenerational struggle for cultural and ecological survival.

Fight Knight
Jimmy Fisco
Fight Knight is set against the intense backdrop of medieval armored combat, following a group of fighters from Nashville as they train, travel and gain visibility across the country. The film explores who these fighters are, what they’re fighting for and why they keep showing up. It’s a meditation on strength, identity and belonging, told through the armor, bruises and unlikely tenderness of an extreme sport.

Gladice
David Garrett Byars
Drawing from 14 years of stunning footage, Gladice is a fairy-tale documentary about a sentient glacier who develops a parasocial relationship with an arctic wildlife photographer as she grapples with the horrific suspicion that she might be dying.

Guardians of Anatolia*
Elif Koyutürk Hazen
Guardians of Anatolia follows a women-led Sarıkeçili nomadic family, the last of their kind in Türkiye, as they migrate across the Taurus Mountains. The film captures their seasonal journey, rituals and deep bond with nature, offering a poignant look at a vanishing culture and a celebration of their ancestral wisdom.
*Emerging Filmmaker Fellowship

I`m Kabotar
Arman Gholipour Dashtaki
Kabotar, a 68-year-old woman long uprooted from the mountains of Iran, yearns to return to her homeland in search of herself, a lyrical tale of identity, belonging and the eternal embrace of nature.

Kuƞ'ṡi (Grandmother) 
Amanda Erickson & Jen Cohen
Faith Spotted Eagle, revered elder from the Yankton Sioux Tribe, has dedicated her life to defending Native communities and restoring her homelands for future generations. When the current administration endangers her life’s work that's taken decades to build, she prepares a league of extraordinary grandmothers for the battle of their lifetimes.

Lift Off
Michael Crommett
Teenagers from three different American communities chase dreams fueled by science, hope and hard-won opportunity. Lift Off explores how participation in the world’s largest student model rocketry competition, and the mentorship, resources and belonging that come with it, can shape not just what young people build, but who they become in an unequal America.

Listening to Whales
Grace McNally
In 1970, Katy Payne and her husband discovered that whales sing, igniting a global conservation movement. Decades later, her protégé, Chris Clark, uncovers a devastating truth: military sonar may be destroying the very whales they once fought to save. Listening to Whales is a story of scientific wonder, betrayal and reconciliation across generations.

Little Salt
Anne Keller & Cullen Purser
In arid western Colorado, Little Salt follows six people at the center of the Colorado River crisis. As the river’s flow declines, tensions rise over who gets water, revealing how agriculture, tribal sovereignty, conservation and policy shape the future of the river and those who depend on it.

Oh! Possum!
Georgia Krause
When a renegade opossum stows away from Seattle to Alaska, she turns a sleepy town upside down. From birthing babies to dodging capture, she sparks a debate about nature, fame and belonging.

Orange, Beetle, Mother & I
Manisha Halai
As climate change threatens her tribe’s orange orchards, a young Indigenous filmmaker returns to her remote Himalayan village only to find herself caught between a mother who refuses to let go, a sister who longs to leave and her own relationship to land, memory and love.

Papertown
Jeremy Seifert & Benjamin James Roberts
When the paper mill that sustained a small Appalachian town for over a century shuts down, its people face not only economic collapse, but a deeper question: Who are they without it?

Potholes & Dreams
Tarek Turkey
In a Baghdad that’s finding its footing again, 19-year-old Yas transforms its cracked asphalt into his skateboard runway, gliding beyond childhood shadows and carving out his horizon.

Preparations
Kendi King
Preparations explores water as survival in displaced Black communities. Through the eyes of full-time firefighter, part-time swim instructor Geordan Colden, Preparations blends verité, archival and devised performance to ask: What does it mean to prepare your people for a safety that is always being threatened?

Reef Keepers
Alyson Larson & Natalie van Hoose
Florida’s Coral Reef has guarded our coastline for thousands of years and now it's struggling to survive. Reef Keepers follows the journey of a tight-knit band of defiant scientists who refuse to let the reef and the communities that depend on it, slip away. Amid record-breaking heat waves, hurricanes and loss, they’re proving that stewardship and grit can turn the tide. 

Resisting The Use of Force
donnie l. betts
A grandfather to three Black boys investigates the generational impact of police violence in America starting in Aurora, CO and expanding nationwide. Through real stories and radical accountability, Resisting The Use of Force demands justice––reform, reset, rethink. 

Seven Continents
Daniel Lombroso
The son of a Holocaust survivor and veteran of the Yom Kippur War sets out to run marathons on all seven continents, confronting history, aging and his bond with his filmmaker son. A spiritual sequel to Daniel Lombroso’s Nina & Irena, which won Best Short Film at Mountainfilm 2023.

Snow Globe
David Sampliner & Rachel Shuman
Soon after his father dies, filmmaker David Sampliner experiences his hometown’s first snowless winter. Reckoning with loss, he goes searching for the snowy winters of his childhood. Along the way he encounters artists and scientists who unveil snow’s hidden wonders and help him grapple with the fragility of the things we love, and the longing to make them last.
 

Stalin Boys
Ora DeKornfeld & Bianca Giaever
Four Mexican American middle school boys in a Texas border town have developed an unusual obsession: Joseph Stalin. When their teacher tells them about the Texas State History Fair, they write a play about the Soviet dictator and his efforts to destroy all who opposed him. With cardboard props and fur hats purchased on the internet, the boys enter the competition as underdogs and leave home for the very first time.

Unheard Heights
Hazel Cramer
It wasn’t until Taylor Fahey started climbing that she found something she had been looking for her entire life: an ASL community. Unheard Heights is an intimate story exploring Taylor’s sense of belonging as a Hard of Hearing person in culturally Deaf circles. From feeling like an imposter torn between two worlds, to finding an inclusive community through a transformative sport, Fahey grows through her inner struggle.

Wood Street
Caron Creighton
Two unhoused men turned community leaders, John and LaMonté, organize their neighbors in the face of displacement, addiction and a failing social system. Their story is a powerful testament to resilience, solidarity and the right to remain.

About Mountainfilm: Established in 1979, Mountainfilm is one of North America’s longest-running documentary film festivals, held annually over Memorial Day weekend in Telluride, Colorado. Mountainfilm is dedicated to using the power of film, art and ideas to inspire audiences to create a better world. The festival offers an immersive experience featuring a wide range of filmmakers, speakers, adventurers and activists in addition to screening cutting-edge, award-winning documentary films from around the world. Mountainfilm is an Academy Award® Qualifying Festival in the Documentary Short Film category. Mountainfilm on Tour also reaches audiences year-round through its global film program, and through Mountainfilm for Students, an educational outreach initiative for youth. Simply put, Mountainfilm has the power to change lives. To learn more, visit www.mountainfilm.org. To join the conversation, please read Mountainfilm’s news and follow @mountainfilm on Instagram, Threads, Facebook and LinkedIn.