Documentary Filmmaker Stephen Maing Honored by IDA with Courage Under Fire Award

December 5, 2018

Los Angeles

The Courage Under Fire Award from the International Documentary Association honors documentary filmmaker Stephen Maing, at the IDA's annual awards, December 8 in Los Angeles.

Maing is honored for his explosive documentary exposing the New York police department's racially discriminatory policing practices.

A class action suit by twelve minority whistleblower officers revealed the NYPD's practice of pressuring minority officers to issue predetermined numbers of arrests and summonses per month, often in communities of color it classified as 'high crime.'

Stephen Maing is an Emmy-nominated, Brooklyn-based filmmaker. His 2012 feature documentary, High Tech, Low Life, chronicled the gripping story of two of China's first dissident citizen-journalists fighting state-monitored censorship, and was broadcast nationally on PBS.  

His short film The Surrender, produced with Academy Award winner Laura Poitras, documented State Department intelligence analyst Stephen Kim's harsh prosecution under the Espionage Act, and was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Short Documentary.

He has directed numerous films for Time Magazine, The Nation, The New York Times, The Intercept, PBS and Field of Vision; his New York Times Op-Docs documentary, Hers to Lose, was awarded a World Press Photo Award for Long Features.

Maing is a Sundance Institute Fellow, a John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Reporting Fellow, and an IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund grantee. His most recent film, Crime + Punishment, was filmed over four years and received a Special Jury Award for Social Impact Filmmaking at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.