The 35th Annual Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival is proud to honor Joe Berlinger with the Brent Renaud Career Achievement Award, and Yoruba Richen with the Impact Award.

Joe Berlinger, who will receive the Brent Renaud Career Achievement Award, is an Academy Award nominated and multiple Emmy-winning filmmaker who has spent more than three decades using nonfiction storytelling to investigate crime, injustice and abuses of power. His landmark films include Brother’s Keeper, the Paradise Lost Trilogy, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, and Crude. Berlinger’s work has helped secure the freedom of seven wrongfully convicted people, including three from death row, while advancing causes ranging from criminal-justice reform to environmental and human-rights accountability. A recipient of Peabody, DGA and Sundance awards, he has also brought socially consequential storytelling to global audiences through 19 Netflix productions, including his acclaimed Conversations with a Killer series. Joe will also be participating in a conversation about his career with award-winning filmmaker Allison Berg (Time Warp) at the Filmmaker Forum on Monday, October 12, at 9:15 AM.

Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996), the first in a trilogy of films about the horrific triple murder of three boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, in 1993 and the subsequent arrest of three teenagers accused of killing the boys as part of an alleged satanic ritual, will screen Sunday, October 11, at 6:00 PM at the Arlington Resort Hotel & Spa, with Berlinger in attendance.

Yoruba Richen, the Impact Award honoree, is the founder of Promised Land Film, which is devoted to producing documentaries that illuminate issues of race, space, and power.  Her work has been featured on multiple outlets and has been Emmy-nominated.  She directed The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, which won a Peabody Award, a Gracie and was honored by the Television Academy. Her recent film American Coup: Wilmington 1898, which had its world premiere at the 2024 Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, was nominated for a Peabody award. Yoruba was awarded the Trailblazer award by Black Public Media and is the Founding Director of the Documentary Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Her new documentary short, Free Joan Little, will screen on October 10th at 12:15 PM as part of the “Lasting Legacies” Shorts Program.