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…
