The Ford Foundation, with its murky connections to the CIA during the Cold War and 1973’s bloody Chilean coup (Costa-Gavras’ Missing, anyone?), has been quietly funding challenging and progressive documentaries with an eye toward social justice and even international diplomacy. In fact, its online film collection reflects the foundation’s history, since 1980, of funding a limited but impressive selection of such projects.

Now, through its recently launched JustFilms program, the foundation says it will pledge some $50 million to new documentaries over the next five years.

“With the growth of the Web and social networks, the potential global audience for filmed content with a social conscience has exploded,” said foundation president Luis A. Ubiñas yesterday in a statement timed to coincide with the opening of The Sundance Film Festival this week.

The Sundance Institute, it turns out, is a new Ford Foundation partner, as is ITVS, creators of the PBS documentary series Independent Lens. The financial pledge from the foundation, according to its web site, will allow the Sundance Institute to “support 10 additional new works a year, offer finishing funds for five to 10 films a year, organize a yearly International Filmmaker Lab hosted in regions around the world, develop and support new technology solutions for filmmakers, and feature screenings of JustFilms-supported works at funding competitions, before industry panels and at festivals.” JustFilms says it will invest $10 million a year in documentary work during the next five years. The Sundance Institute will get $1 million of that total every year for five years.

Orlando Bagwell, producer and director of another well-known and award-winning PBS series, Eyes on the Prize, heads up the JustFilm program, which is based in New York. He had worked with the foundation for the past seven years before accepting the directorship of the newly created initiative in 2010.

The Ford Foundation’s broader goals for JustFilm underscore a shift toward transparency that may feel somewhat surprising to long-time documentarians. “It remains a challenge for most documentary filmmakers to find support—and audiences—for works that address social issues in meaningful and compelling ways,” the program explains on its site. “JustFilms seeks to support courageous filmmakers to complete their important works and to help them reach a growing audience of engaged and socially conscious viewers.”

Still, many filmmakers might consider this kind of unconditional support for their sometimes incendiary work rather strange, considering its source. John Anderson, writing last Friday in the New York Times about one of JustFilm’s recent beneficiaries, Kim A. Snyder’s Welcome to Shelbyville, certainly registers that confusion:

[It] is a melting-pot movie, asimmer with social issues: immigration, racism, unemployment, intolerance. Its examination of the clash between Somali Muslims and rural Tennesseeans does not sugarcoat the kinds of conflicts that have bedeviled the country for centuries; it questions, in its way, what America means. And it’s been shown around the world by the United States State Department…[as] one of the films in the American Documentary Showcase, a State Department program.

Propaganda is not what it used to be.

Another film selected for the showcase, adds Anderson, is Street Fight by Marshall Curry, who was “shocked when they picked [it.] … I thought: ‘How did this happen? Who’s going to be fired when they finally see this list?’” But Anderson notes that none of the filmmakers or films selected, which include Snyder’s JustFilms-funded project, have been censored by the State Department.

My guess is that with the money JustFilms is promising, any concern about the Ford Foundation’s motives will likely give way to relief and genuine excitement as more of these films receive funding and are seen.

You can apply for a grant through the foundation here.