I just became a member of a group I never wanted to join — filmmakers whose National Endowment for the Humanities grants were terminated.
As you may have heard, President Donald Trump and DOGE recently cut the vast majority of staff and grants at the NEH. It’s hit documentary filmmakers hard.
With the NEH cuts, DOGE has targeted 89 documentary and related “media” projects (this includes podcasts). Among them are a four-part Ken Burns docuseries exploring the history of our criminal justice system; Rita Coburn’s film on W.E.B. Du Bois; and Matia Karrell and Hilary Prentice’s documentary Coming Home: Fight for a Legacy, about America’s overlooked female World War II aviators. Even documentaries on baseball and Nancy Drew saw their funding stopped. The future of some of these projects is now uncertain.
In many cases the films were stopped midstream — Karrell and Prentice were able to get 20 percent of their funds, for instance, but the remaining $480,000 are currently inaccessible. This sum — earned after a decade of research, filming and personal investment — is everything to the filmmakers, even as it’s peanuts to the federal government. Between $10 million and $20 million in “media funding” were cut. That may sound hefty, but it’s only about 10 percent of the NEH’s overall budget (many other grantees of course saw cuts too), which is 0.003 percent of the total federal budget. Hardly a deficit buster.
The mass termination of NEH awards is unprecedented in the agency’s 60-year history, and doesn’t just affect filmmakers. It also impacts the cultural lifeblood of our country. The NEH was established in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and in the years since has awarded $6 billion in grants to humanities councils in 56 states and jurisdictions in support of projects that deepen understanding of our shared humanity. Many NEH-funded films have had major social impact, from Gordon Parks’ 1984 made-for-public television film Solomon Northup’s Odyssey, based on the Twelve Years a Slave author’s odyssey to A Midwife’s Tale, a docudrama based on the diary of an early American midwife that aired on PBS’s American Experience in 1997. Or 2020’s Crip Camp, an empowering look at the disability rights movement by James Lebrecht, one of its activists and founders. All that is now imperiled.
My own letter was a gut punch. I’d been working on a documentary, My Underground Mother, for over a decade. The film traces my search for my late mother’s hidden Holocaust past, which included time at a Jewish women’s forced labor camp that she and 60 other inmates wrote about in a secret diary (a band of resisters who I locate around the world in real time, combining written passages with new interviews). Their story highlights an untold aspect of the Holocaust and the evil consequences of antisemitism.
But the nonprofit sponsoring my work (all NEH films have one) received a letter last month from Michael McDonald, the NEH’s acting chair, that stated my documentary “no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement,” based on a rarely used clause that gives federal agencies broad authority to stop funding projects that don’t adhere to an administration’s agenda. “Your grant’s immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities,” it read.
Apparently my small independent film wasn’t only deemed a waste of taxpayers’ money by this administration — its very funding was imperiling the “urgent” fiscal needs of our nation.
All of this seemed especially peculiar given how President Trump is currently at war with major universities for their alleged failures to combat antisemitism. The irony wasn’t lost on Sen. Elizabeth Warren either — she singled out My Underground Mother as an especially egregious example of a bad cut decision. President Trump also stated that many of the terminated projects focused on DEI, but it’s hard to see how that applies to movies about the likes of artist Frida Kahlo or Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.
As the Academy Award-nominated director Immy Humes — a grantee who has been working on a film about the little-known indie-cinema figure Shirley Clarke and who has organized a group of filmmakers to fight the moves – notes, “The cuts are too sweeping and undefined.” She adds, “I was on cloud nine when I was notified about my NEH grant award. And then boom. This crazy termination with no warning.”
While DOGE’s Elon Musk has characterized federal grants as handouts and grant recipients as freeloaders scamming the federal government, let me be the first to tell you, the NEH grant process isn’t for those looking for easy payouts. Statistically, it’s harder to win an NEH grant than to gain admission to Harvard, and it’s often preceded by rejections. My first award, a film development grant of $75,000, was the culmination of nearly a decade of research, writing, filming, pitching and fundraising.
The vetting process here was nearly as thorough. One insider said that the only DOGE people who visited were two young men who only spent a few days at the office.
Needless to say, the impact of these cuts will be huge and resonate far beyond the documentary world. Defunding these grants means harming every library, historical society, museum and organization that produces, distributes and plays these films. This pipeline is further damaged by Trump’s proposed gutting of the NEA and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
It’s hard to know what the next steps could or should be. Instead of issuing clear guidelines on how to appeal, the administration issued a series of confusing directives, extending the 30-day appeal window by another 30 days but also stating: “NEH is not offering a means of dispute resolution.”
It’s up to the nonprofit organizations the NEH works with, not individual filmmakers, to seek legal redress for the grant terminations. But this makes for a scattershot approach, with many choosing to accept termination out of fear of losing overdue reimbursements. Others, like Prentice, whose production partner Women Make Movies is filing an appeal on behalf of her film, have decided to push back.
Some recent wins in court, most notably by journalists from the Voice of America, do give hope. (Though an appeals court just reversed the ruling.) V.O.A. was founded during World War II to broadcast fact-based journalism to troops and citizens abroad and counter Nazi propaganda. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my film’s deep dive into history, it’s that there’s no better way to counter hate than by humanizing the other. I’ve seen first hand how meeting a Holocaust survivor, whether in person or through a project, can dispel the most deep-seated antisemitic beliefs. But if the NEH, NEA and local humanities councils are defunded, the platforms that can bridge divides will be severely limited. And so, too, will our chances of stemming hate’s rising ride.
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history,” wrote George Orwell. As we celebrate the Allies win over hatred with the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day on Thursday, we can hope, pray — and fight — to ensure that organizations like the NEH are here to stop that destruction.
Marisa Fox is a veteran journalist and television producer and the director of “My Underground Mother.”