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
