Sundance Institute Partners With Templeton Foundation To Boost Funding For Nonfiction Filmmakers, Countering Pessimistic Mood In Doc Field

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: Retrenchment by many distribution platforms has made for “highly turbulent times” in the documentary industry, the Sundance Institute acknowledges, but with help from a major foundation it is injecting some much-needed positive news into a field beset by anxiety.

The nonprofit institute announced today that under a three-year partnership with the John Templeton Foundation the size of the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund will swell by $500,000 a year, allowing it to double the size of grants “across the board, from development to post-production.” The current open call for applications – which closes Monday, April 17 – will “award selected projects at the development stage grants of up to $40,000 and Production and Post-Production grants of up to $100,000.” “Given what is happening in the field, it just seems incredibly urgent to me and to many others that the nonprofit ecosystem kick in,” Carrie Lozano, the Sundance Institute’s director of documentary film program and artist programs, told Deadline. “We’re so thrilled that the John Templeton Foundation has come on board to support us… If we want to continue to support artists and we want to see this work made, we have to step up.” Lozano anticipates about a thousand applications for this cycle of grants.  “It’s an international fund, and that’s a really big and important part of what we do,” she said. “We don’t exclude any region, or any story or storyteller.

We have priorities, and we definitely prioritize regions where there’s either less of an ecosystem, regions where there’s conflict happening where there are stories that need to be told… We’re also looking, as Sundance does across the board, at emerging filmmakers, either first- or second-time