Another Emmy season has come and gone. This year’s winners and nominees are once again a sweeping validation of the left-leaning Ford Foundation’s strategy to sponsor and cultivate progressive films and filmmakers.
The Ford Foundation’s biggest winner this season, “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” an artsy biopic about a poet and activist, won a creative arts Emmy for “exceptional merit in documentary filmmaking.” The film’s producers, husband-wife duo Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster, received six Ford Foundation grants for the project, totaling $310,000, according to their public grants database.
But Ford’s success this award season extends far beyond this individual film: The foundation has its fingerprints on many of the most esteemed and successful documentaries — from the films themselves to the training and education of the filmmakers who created them.
Cinema’s slow march to the left, from the golden years of John Ford’s pro-American westerns and dramas of the 1950s to the politically correct superheroes of today, did not happen by accident. Like all left-wing institutions, “woke Hollywood” is supported by a vast network of progressive foundations, nonprofit organizations, and public funding. The entire film ecosystem, from film training programs to festivals, awards, direct funding, and advocacy, lifts all boats in the media and entertainment space, bringing us everything from the Hollywood movies and actors we know and love to the advocacy-oriented independent films and documentaries that slowly move the needle on the culture. At the moment, that ecosystem is controlled almost entirely by left-leaning funding, chiefly from the Ford Foundation.
According to a 2022 report from Inside Philanthropy, the Ford Foundation is “clearly the biggest foundation funder of film in the country,” spending about $62.4 million a year on film — or about 12.5 percent of their total annual grantmaking.
Much of Ford’s film strategy is run through their JustFilms initiative, which “supports independent film and emerging media projects that explore urgent social justice issues and seeks to challenge inequality in all its forms.”
There is nothing nefarious about a left-leaning organization supporting progressive advocacy through film. Indeed, the fact that Ford has become the largest player in this space with such a small portion of its funds is evidence that conservatives can easily step into the fray if they so choose, competing to create a healthy, balanced environment for the entertainment industry. But decades of uneven funding have shaped the films, filmmakers, and awards that shape the culture.
Documentary films tend to rely on philanthropic gifts, so foundation funding often stands up films that could not otherwise support themselves. Documentaries are uniquely positioned to affect the way Americans think about specific issues, thereby shaping the public consciousness. Just look at how “Gasland” and “An Inconvenient Truth” affected the way Americans think about climate. As the nation’s largest documentary funder, Ford is a kingmaker when it comes to shaping culture through film.
Ford’s Strategy
Even so, one can’t just put money into documentary filmmaking and start buying Emmys. Ford has a straightforward and coherent film funding strategy that supports an entire healthy ecosystem of progressive filmmaking, which eventually yields the type of mainstream hits that affect hearts and minds.
The first aspect of this strategy is long-term, sustained giving. Ford has been consistently investing in film for decades, spreading their funds around with mission-aligned filmmakers, unafraid of the industry eventuality that most movies flop. JustFilms, which sent out 187 content grants for films between 2018 and 2021, has made a point of backing the little guy. Fifty-two percent of the program’s grants go to filmmakers who had previously made fewer than five films. These grants, with a median spend of $125,000, often give early-career filmmakers their first big chance, well positioning them to raise future funds off their success with Ford.
Of course, they always take care of their top talent. “Going to Mars” was not the first film for which Brewster and Stephenson received Ford funding. They were also nominated for an Emmy in 2015 for “American Promise,” a film about the admission process of the prestigious Dalton School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that received a total of $800,000 from the foundation.
Documentary Infrastructure
Secondly, Ford has carefully cultivated what California-based consulting firm Informing Change has called the “social justice documentary ecosystem” that consists of “filmmakers, filmmaker support organizations, academia, journalism, tech, social movements, and more.” JustFilms spends 60 percent of their total funds on the components of this “documentary infrastructure.”
Two films that received JustFilms funding in 2024 recently premiered at Sundance: “Union,” a film about labor organizing at Amazon, and “The Battle for Laikipia,” a film about “unresolved historical injustices and climate change … in a generations-old conflict between Indigenous pastoralists and white landowners in Laikipia, Kenya.” Both of those projects were supported by a $4.2 million film fund for “documentary films focused on social justice.”
Ford funds permeate the progressive film space, from programs at film schools, to film conferences, pitch contests, and training programs for young filmmakers. For example, since 2021, Ford gave more than $9.6 million to a nonprofit called Firelight Media, the mission of which is to support “documentary filmmakers of color.” Almost all this money was earmarked for “general support to connect inclusive talent pipelines with best practices for film impact and audience engagement, and for core support for institutional strengthening.”
Firelight filmmakers receive either funding, training, or the opportunity to mentor up-and-coming progressive talent. One such filmmaker is Michèle Stephenson herself, who received Firelight funding in both 2022 and 2024. Through Firelight, Stephenson likely has the opportunity to pass along her knowledge and skills to the next generation. Stephenson has also been associated with the Ford-funded Women Make Movies and New York Women in Film and Television.
Finally, Ford supports a variety of film festivals to facilitate distribution of the very films it funds. To keep with our main example, “Going to Mars” and “American Promise” both won and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, as have many Ford-funded films. Ford has supported the Sundance Institute since 2000, having donated $14.7 million since 2006, most of it earmarked for documentary films or general development support. Ford invests heavily in the most prestigious festivals, while spreading smaller grants around minor festivals to keep the entire system strong and healthy.
Recent Ford-backed films that have won at Sundance include “The Fight,” about the efforts of American Civil Liberties Union attorneys to combat the policies of the Trump administration, which won the 2020 U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Social Impact Filmmaking, and “Philly D.A.,” about left-wing Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner, which won the 2021 Sundance Institute/Amazon Studios Producers Award for Nonfiction.
Conservative Counterbalance
Right-of-center folks who bemoan a slate of woke Emmy winners should complain not of a perceived rigged TV academy, but about the failure of conservatives to create a counterbalance to this massive and successful film ecosystem.
The successes of Brewster and Stephenson are their own, and their relationship with the Ford Foundation should take nothing away from their achievements. However, they serve as a perfect example of talented filmmakers benefiting not just from left-wing grantmaking, but from the entire progressive documentary film ecosystem, from Sundance to Firelight, and beyond.
Decades of successful films have proven Ford’s strategy to be the right one — so when will conservatives imitate that same strategy and compete in the cultural arena?
Thomas Pack is an associate producer and director of the Film Incubator at Palladium Pictures, where he runs a film training program to support the next generation of documentarians.
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