In the ’90s, Sarah Jacobson was a rising indie filmmaker. Beginning with her half-hour short film I Was A Teenage Serial Killer in 1993, she garnered enough underground critical success to make her feature debut, Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore, a coming-of-age tale about a teenage girl’s loss of virginity and her friends’ experiences with their first times. Jacobson was set to move on to bigger films, but she sadly passed away from endometrial cancer at age 32 in 2004. To carry on her life’s work and support for fellow filmmakers, Jacobson’s mother and film producer Ruth Jacobson and filmmaker Sam Green (The Weather Underground) established the Sarah Jacobson Film Grant in 2004, supporting young female filmmakers whose voices reflect Jacobson’s D.I.Y. tenacity, outsider creativity, and awareness of social issues regarding women today.

This year the organization plans to give out two grants supporting film projects in any stage of completion from pre-production through distribution. The amounts will be between $1,000 and $2,000. The judges for the grant applications are filmmaker Allison Anders, multimedia artist Michelle Handelman, musician/activist Kathleen Hanna, and Catherine Tyc. The deadline is November 15th, and application rules can be found here. In addition, donations can be made at the donation page.