Impact Partners Executive Director Jenny Raskin on Financing, Fellowships, and Following the Filmmakers’ Lead

From 2018’s feature doc Oscar winner Icarus, to 2019’s Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary recipient Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, to the Sundance Grand Jury Prize nabbing Of Fathers and Sons and Dina (in 2018 and 2017, respectively), Impact Partners has been behind some of the most critically acclaimed nonfiction work of recent years.

The company’s winning streak, however, actually goes back a decade, all the way to 2010’s Academy Award for Documentary Feature recipient The Cove. And Impact Partners itself goes back even further. Founded in 2007 by Dan Cogan and Geralyn Dreyfous with a mission to bring about social change through cinema (and without sacrificing artistry), Impact Partners recently raised veteran doc producer and director Jenny Raskin to the role of Executive Director.

And since Raskin was in Park City with the company’s slate of five Sundance-selected features — Kim Snyder’s Us Kids, Matt Wolf’s Spaceship Earth, Jim Stern’s Giving Voice, Hubert Sauper’s Epicentro, and most controversially, Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick’s On the Record — Filmmaker decided to pick Raskin’s brain about everything from the current documentary landscape to equity investing to supporting filmmakers who find themselves in the media’s crosshairs.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.