Three Oscar Nominees Board ICE Doc 'Water Cooler' as EPs — SkimNews
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- Geeta Gandbhir, Sam Pollard, and Alisa Payne — all Academy Award nominees — are joining the Oscar-contending short documentary "Water Cooler" as executive producers alongside existing EP Blair Foster.
- Emma V.F. directed, produced, filmed, and edited the documentary inside the corridors of immigration court at Federal Plaza in New York City from November 2025 through January 2026, capturing masked ICE agents chatting about Black Friday deals and taser models one moment and forcibly detaining migrants seeking legal status the next.
- "Water Cooler" won Best Documentary Short at Palm Springs International ShortFest 2026, qualifying the film for Oscar consideration, and previously screened at DC/DOX in Washington, D.C.
- The film is programmed at the Hamptons International Film Festival on October 18, the Woodstock Film Festival on October 19, AFI Fest in Los Angeles on October 24, and the St. Louis International Film Festival next month.
- Message Pictures, the production company co-founded by Gandbhir, Pollard, and Payne, is producing alongside Spoonbill Stories; Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (Seeds, Union, Power) composed the original score.
- V.F. framed the project personally, saying that as the granddaughter of Italian immigrants and Jewish New Yorkers, her forebears "would be outraged to see masked federal agents disappearing law-abiding people down stairwells in their city."
Why it matters: The film now carries heavyweight Oscar pedigree — three nominees as EPs plus a Best Documentary Short win at Palm Springs — heading into a packed fall festival run and Academy qualification. V.F.'s two-month, openly-filmed direct-cinema approach inside Federal Plaza corridors gives the project rare verité credibility on ICE tactics at a moment of heightened national focus on immigration enforcement. For Message Pictures, the alignment signals a serious awards push built on direct observation rather than narrated advocacy.
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