When you’re busy making your film, it can feel impossible to stay on top of grant deadlines and opportunities, festivals, and general industry goings-on. But knowing about these things can be essential to completing and distributing your film. Thus, a line I never thought I’d compose: thank goodness for Twitter. These accounts can help you keep track of what you might need to know outside of the edit room. (And, shameless plug: you can get a lot of this news on our Indie Film Weekly podcast every Thursday morning, too!)

BRITDOC - @BRITDOC
The folks that brought us The Good Pitch fill their feed with useful tidbits for doc-makers, including a list of 100+ funding opportunities.

Firelight Media - @firelightmedia
Not only does Firelight make films, they also fund and run fellowships and labs for other makers. An all-around resource.

HBO Documentaries - @HBOdocs
Although this account mainly promotes HBO films, their programmers are a tastemaking powerhouse, so it’s worth knowing what they’ve lined up, and watching some great films at the same time.

Hot Docs Industry - @hotdocsindustry
The business end of North America’s largest documentary festival @HotDocs, the industry group’s tweets are most useful for producers—covering the market, professional sessions, funding and distribution news.

i-Docs - @i_docs
Everything you need to know about the emerging field of interactive documentary.

POV - @POVdocs
PBS’s venerable documentary series links to their premieres here, but they also provide lots of useful resources from their own blog, including DocSoup and DocMemo, a “daily list of essential reading for the documentary and independent filmmaking community.”

Sheffield Doc/Fest - @sheffdocfest
Describing themselves as “The UK's leading documentary and digital media festival, conference and market,” they are also prolific tweeters, with over 20,000 dispatches in the cloud.

Sundance Institute - @sundancelabs
The best way to make sure you don’t miss deadlines for Sundance’s considerable grants and applications for their doc-friendly labs like New Frontiers Story Lab, Creative Producers Lab, and, of course, Documentary Edit and Story Labs.

Stranger Than Fiction - @stfdocs
A screening series run by New York’s documentary guru Thom Powers, their Twitter account links to additional news, like their “Monday Memos” which round up the week’s happenings from all over the doc world.

The D-Word - @dwordcom
This bustling online community of doc filmmakers shares a mishmash of documentary information, including live-tweets from panels at some major industry events.

The International Documentary Association - @IDAorg
A plethora of information on all things documentary, from funding, to fests, to new releases, to learning opportunities.

Which heavily-tweeting orgs are missing from this list? Please add in the comments!

Documentary