How the Ford Foundation Changed Entertainment: Film Festivals

How the Ford Foundation Changed the Entertainment Industry (full series)
The Ford Foundation | Direct Film Funding | Film Festivals
Outreach, Networks, and Education | Why Ford’s Strategy Works

Film Festivals

Production funding is not enough to ensure a film’s impact, nor can marketing dollars alone manufacture success. Filmmakers can gain credibility for their projects with the public—and more crucially, with distributors—by winning awards at film festivals. The largest and most important of these festivals are well known to have a left-progressive bias, but this is partially because only left-of-center donors like Ford bother to support them. Ford knows that for their films to be successful, they need to appear in prestigious and well-funded festivals.

Grants to festivals and festival operators are a comparatively small but important component of Ford’s film funding strategy. A search for the phrase “film festival” in the Ford Foundation’s online grant database—a useful but not fully comprehensive method—returns 73 results to 39 grantees from 2006 through 2023, for a total of over $6.8 million. These include grants to support the festivals themselves—some of which are not especially well known—as well as travel expenses for filmmakers to attend festivals. Festivals that have received Ford funding include the African Film Festival, the Athena Film Festival at Barnard College, the International Documentary Film Festival of Mexico City, the March on Washington Film Festival, and the New Orleans Film and Video Festival.

No American film festival is more famous than the Sundance Film Festival, held annually by a 501(c)(3) charity called the Sundance Institute. Its founder and president is famed actor Robert Redford, and its board of trustees features prominent entertainment industry executives such as longtime Walt Disney Pictures president Sean Bailey, former PBS president and CEO Pat Mitchell, Blumhouse Productions founder Jason Blum, and former Hallmark Media president and CEO Wonya Lucas. Also on the Sundance Institute’s board is Ebs Burnough, who in addition to working as a filmmaker was previously a senior advisor to First Lady Michelle Obama and director of politics and legislation at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1199—one of the most politically powerful local labor unions in the entire country.

Indeed, the Sundance Institute’s board features several prominent individuals who are not from the world of entertainment, but the world of politics and activism. Most notably, this includes Patrick Gaspard, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, which is among the most important left-of-center think tanks nationwide, and one that has deep ties to the Democratic Party. Before that, Gaspard was national political director at SEIU Local 1199 and president of the Open Society Foundations—the multi-billion dollar philanthropic network of political megadonor George Soros. During the Obama Administration, he was White House director of political affairs and U.S. ambassador to South Africa. Also on Sundance’s board is Kimberlé Crenshaw, a major proponent of critical race theory who is credited with having coined the now-ubiquitous activist term “intersectionality.”

The Sundance Institute reported total revenues of $45 million for the fiscal year ending August 31, 2023. While its trademark film festival represents the largest single line item in the institute’s budget, it also operates other programs that support the broader industry. One of these is its documentary film program, which supports documentary filmmakers in a variety of ways and accounted for over $4.1 million of the Sundance Institute’s expenses in its fiscal year 2023. The program was originally set up in 2002 with funding from the Open Society Foundations.

In fact, foundation funding is crucial to the Sundance Institute’s work, and the Ford Foundation has supported it since 2000. According to its online grants database, Ford has committed over $14.7 million to the Sundance Institute since 2006, most of which was earmarked to fund either the documentary film program or for general development support. Tax filings reveal that just over $1.5 million of this was disbursed from 2020 to 2022. Some other large funders of the Sundance Institute during that time period include the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund ($4,105,715), the Foundation to Promote Open Society ($4,000,000), the Silicon Valley Community Foundation ($3,469,600), the MacArthur Foundation ($1,970,000), the Horn Foundation ($1,600,000), the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund ($1,610,000), the Pritzker Pucker Family Foundation ($1,405,000), and the Kendeda Fund ($1,150,000).

The Ford Foundation’s JustFilms program was originally announced one day before the 2011 Sundance Film Festival began. Since then, numerous JustFilms-supported productions have premiered at the festival—more than 20 by 2015, according to press releases on the foundation’s website. While no evidence shows that receiving Ford funding helps place films at Sundance, there is no denying that the foundation’s largest festival-operating grantee has been tremendously useful for some of the films the foundation has supported

A number of festival entrants supported by JustFilms have even won awards at Sundance. Since 2020, these 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
• Philly D.A., about left-wing Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner, which won the 2021 Sundance Institute/Amazon Studios Producers Award for Nonfiction.
• Crip Camp, about a 1970s camp for those with disabilities and the activism associated with it, which won the 2020 Audience Award: U.S. Documentary.
• Softie, about a political activist and candidate in Kenya, which won the 2020 World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Editing.
• Welcome to Chechnya, about the persecution of LGBT individuals in Chechnya, which won the 2020 U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Editing.
• Users, about the impacts of modern technologies, which won the 2021 Directing Award: U.S. Documentary.
• I Didn’t See You There, about disabled individuals and how they are seen, which won the 2022 Directing Award: U.S. Documentary.
• Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, about progressive poet Nikki Giovanni and “the joy and the raw reality of the Black experience,” which won the 2023 U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary.
• The Battle for Laikipia, about environmental and racial tensions in Kenya, which won the 2024 Sundance Institute/Amazon MGM Studios Producers Award for Nonfiction.
• Union, about the organizing efforts of the Amazon Labor Union, which won the 2024 U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for the Art of Change.

Ford’s festival strategy appears to be twofold. First, it puts significant funding behind the groups that hold some of the most influential festivals in the world (such as Sundance) and directly funds films that appear in it. Second, it also funds smaller festivals to help keep the broader landscape healthy and competitive. Ford contributes to festivals that amplify stories that match the foundation’s ideology. Few such festivals exist on the right. This may be because conservative donors don’t subscribe to the same mentality and neglect to fund existing right-of-center festivals to nearly the same degree that their left-of-center counterparts do.

In the next installment, the Ford Foundation’s film strategy goes beyond simply paying for making and promoting a movie to spending vast sums on “documentary infrastructure.”