‘Steal This Story, Please!’ Takes the 2025 Audience Award at Hamptons Doc Fest

Jacqui Lofaro, founder and executive director of Hamptons Doc Fest, which just celebrated its 18th year, December 4 to 11, by screening 33 documentary films at the Sag Harbor Cinema, Bay Street Theater and Southampton Playhouse, has announced that the winner of the 2025 Brown Harris Stevens Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature is the Opening Night film “Steal This Story, Please!”

The film follows intrepid journalist Amy Goodman as she covers hotspots around the globe, illustrating how an independent media is vital to a functioning democracy. As Goodman, who grew up in nearby Bay Shore, explains in the film, she wanted other media to “steal her stories, please” to get more media coverage on the issues.

“‘We will not be silent’ should be the Hippocratic Oath of the media today,” she says.

“Amy Goodman is a rock star, and the 220 people in attendance at Bay Street Theater for the opening night of the film festival also thought so,” said Lofaro in announcing the award to the film’s Oscar-nominated (“Trouble the Water”) co-directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, who spent over 12 years making the film. “At the film’s core is Amy’s courageous journalism and honest reporting in the face of attacks on democracy. It ignited us all to value the currency of free speech, a right worth fighting for.”

Both directors and Goodman attended the Q&A at Bay Street Theater, where Goodman also announced that “Democracy Now!,” the daily independent news program, with syndication in over 750 radio and TV stations that she co-founded in 1996 and hosts, will be celebrating its 30th anniversary.

In accepting the award, co-directors Deal and Lessin said, "We are incredibly thankful to the Hamptons community and DocFest for their warm embrace of ‘Steal This Story, Please!’ The Sag Harbor screening was a magical experience, made even more special by this honor. At a time when our democracy is under attack, this award affirms the public’s hunger for stories that interrogate power and celebrate resistance, and for the kind of uncompromising — and uncompromised — journalism that Amy Goodman and the ‘Democracy Now!’ team practice every day."

For those interested in seeing the post-screening interview at Bay Street Theater led by Andrew Botsford, all of the Q&As from Hamptons Doc Fest’s 18th festival can be viewed on the website at hamptonsdocfest.com. “Democracy Now!” airs Monday through Saturday at 10 a.m., and also at other times, on East Hampton Town’s LTV, Channel 20.