In late May, Los Angeles-based filmmaker and CalArts Film Directing program director Lee Anne Schmitt was honored at the 23rd annual Documenta Madrid, the city of Madrid’s international documentary film festival.
Receiving 1,650 submissions from nearly 20 countries, the festival awarded films in both national and international categories. Recognizing feature-length and short documentaries not previously screened in Madrid, the Jury Prize for Best International Film was awarded to Schmitt’s Evidence (United States, 2025).
The competition’s jury praised the film “for its strong authorial voice, connecting the intimate and familial with their global consequences, for its profound research in understanding this process, and for its poetic cinematography.”
Both deeply personal and profoundly political, Evidence explores Schmitt’s father’s career at the Olin Corporation and the corporation’s seminal role in funding conservative thinktanks. Made during the COVID-19 pandemic, Schmitt’s fourth feature-length documentary is a timely analysis of the power of wealthy corporate leaders to influence and manipulate society’s values. Last fall, the essay film was awarded the Cinematic Vision Award at Maine’s Camden International Film Festival. It was also screened at the Berlin International Film Festival and New York Film Festival last year.
Schmitt’s work has been exhibited widely at venues around the world, including the Centre Pompidou, The Getty, MoMA, Northwest Film Society, and REDCAT, and festivals such as Viennale, CPH/DOX, Oberhausen, Rotterdam, BAFICI, and FID Marseilles. She is a recent recipient of a Graham Foundation Grant, Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Creative Capital Award.
