The Ford Foundation has announced grants totaling nearly $20.3 million in support of independent documentary film.

JustFilms, an initiative of the foundation's Creativity and Free Expression program, awarded new and renewal grants in support of 122 film projects, organizations, and filmmakers in the United States and Global South, including more than $5 million in support of seventy-one projects, forty-nine of them new grantees, with 73 percent of grant dollars going to filmmakers identifying as Black, Indigenous, or people of color. Film projects that will receive grants include Aftershock, directed by Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee, in which, following the preventable deaths of two young women due to childbirth complications, two bereaved fathers galvanize activists, birth-workers, and physicians to reckon with the maternal health crisis in the United States; For All the Saints, directed by CB Hackworth, in which Andrew Young reflects on the lives and work of John Lewis, C.T. Vivian, and Hosea Williams in the Civil Rights Movement; In Plain Sight, directed by PJ Raval, a docuseries that radically reframes the immigrant experience in support of the abolition of U.S. migrant detention; and Wilfred Buck, directed by Lisa Jackson, a hybrid feature documentary about a Winnipeg-based Cree elder who's at the forefront of an Indigenous star knowledge movement.

The remaining $15.29 million will support documentary organizations working to support emerging creatives and diversify the documentary film industry at large. Recipients of renewal grants include Black Star Project, Third Horizon, and Sundance Institute, while new grantees include Color Congress, COUSIN Collective, and Morpheyes Studios at Rochester Institute of Technology National Technical Institute for the Deaf.

"We are thrilled to support a variety of filmmakers who refuse to be spectators of history and are using independent documentary as a tool to drive accountability, and not only observation," said Jon-Sesrie Goff, program officer for JustFilms at the Ford Foundation. "They provide a critical perspective that is all more needed for both audiences and the field at large as nonfiction content continues to rise in popularity. We are confident these works will drive wide reach and impact."

For a complete list of films that were awarded 2021 JustFilms grants, see the Ford Foundation website.

 (Photo credit: GettyImages/Coral222)