Photo from www.sundance.org

The 2011 Sundance Film Festival is wrapping up its final week in Park City, Utah, but filmmakers have a new incentive to continue the endeavor to create independent masterpieces. The Ford Foundation is committing $50 million over the next five years to secure a future of filmmakers who “address urgent social issues.” Through its new initiative, JustFilms, the Ford Foundation will endow $10 million a year to documentary projects that are fueled by passion and a purpose to influence social change.

“With the growth of the Web and social networks, the potential global audience for filmed content with a social conscience has exploded,” said Luis Ubinas, president of the Ford Foundation. “We want JustFilms to support visionary filmmakers from around the world to create works on urgent social issues, and help them reach and engage audiences.”

JustFilms is partnering with major organizations, such as the Sundance Institute and the Independent Television Service, in its mission to allocate funds to documentary projects committed to confronting the difficult challenges and issues that define the present generation. The initiative will offer filmmakers an ongoing open application to submit their ideas for films that pursue and promote more just and sustainable solutions to problems evident in the world today.

“Storytelling is a unique and powerful way of helping us understand our past, explore our present and build our future,” said Darren Walker, vice president of Ford’s Education, Creativity and Free Expression program. “We see these stories as vital ingredients to social change, translating how people engage with the world and the issues that define our time.”

Ultimately, JustFilm’s director Orlando Bagwell said the initiative is truly about capturing imaginations:

“This major new commitment to documentaries reflects our recognition that individual stories – meaningfull and well-told – can be a powerful instrument of change,” Bagwell said. “The test of JustFilms will be its ability to lift the voices of independent filmmakers and mediamakers from outside the mainstream, to build audiences for social justice stories, and to enlarge the conversation on critical but often less visible issues.”