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For decades, the critics who have covered this country’s major film festivals have looked like most of the people who make the films: white and male. This means that white men have been at the premieres, writing the all-important first reviews. They have defined the discourse, deciding which films matter and which films don’t, and impacting distribution and awards buzz as well. And even as film festivals have made an effort to ensure that directors, writers, and on-screen talent have become more and more diverse, the critics have stayed monochromatic.

But this year, at the Sundance Film Festival, things changed: thanks to a Press Inclusion Initiative to bring critics of color, LGBTQIA, women, and critics with disabilities to cover the festival, 63% of the accredited press came from underrepresented communities. It was a game changer given how lopsided the landscape is: a study by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found there were 27 white male critics for every one female critic of color. We provided founding support to the initiative along with Emerson Collective, Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Open Society Foundations.

“We realized we had a blind spot,” Sundance Executive Director Keri Putnam said. “Diversity isn’t just about who’s making the films, it’s about how they enter the world. We realized, frankly later than we should have, the implications of the fact that the diverse community of artists here were premiering their work to mostly white male critics. This lack of inclusion has real world implications to sales, distribution and opportunity.”

There’s growing momentum on this issue: in Hollywood, actors like Tessa Thompson and Brie Larson spoke up about the importance of diversifying film criticism and Time’s Up made it a key focus area. For the Nathan Cummings Foundation and Ford Foundation, supporting this initiative was a no-brainer, consistent with our Critical Minded initiative, which works to support cultural critics of color and to shift our discourse so it’s more representative of the country.

In addition to supporting the initiative, the Nathan Cummings Foundation also held a panel highlighting the power of disrupting the dominant white gaze in criticism, as part of the Ford Foundation’s annual JustFilm’s program. The panel featured Pooja Rangan of Amherst College, Hrag Vartanian of Hyperallergic, Doreen St. Félix of The New Yorker, and K. Austin Collins of Vanity Fair. You can view the full panel here.

During the panel, Doreen St. Félix of The New Yorker said: “It’s different if we look at a film like ‘Green Book’ not through the platform of whiteness, but through that of blackness. You just end up with a different take.”

But often that different take comes late. The Oscar-winning film “Green Book” debuted at the Toronto Film Festival last year, receiving mostly enthusiastic reviews – from mostly white critics. Fast forward a few months to the film’s opening on screens everywhere, and Black critics had a completely different perspective – but the dominant narrative had already gained momentum.

During the Critical Minded panel discussion, Vanity Fair critic K. Austin Collins had this to say: “I think what the makers of this movie are missing is just that many Black critics didn’t get to see this movie until it came out; and because it was released during Oscar season, it so happens that when Black critics do finally get to see this movie, it is seen as disrupting the Oscar campaign. I don’t think any of us really care about that. We care about representation.”

The early coverage of “Coco” tells a similar story: when “Coco,” a film about the magic of Mexican culture, was released, not one of the first rounds of reviews appearing in major publications was written by a Latinx critic. In response, Remezcla hired five Latinx critics to review the film.

We’ve seen what happens when cultural critics of color have the opportunity to shape the narrative from the start. There are few, if any, Latinx film critics with full-time gigs. But thanks to the Press Inclusion Initiative, at least four Latinx critics attended the Sundance premiere of “The Infiltrators,” a film by Latinx filmmakers Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra about undocumented young people who risk deportation to infiltrate a detention center in Florida. Among the critics there that night was Carlos Aguilar, an undocumented person himself. You can read his review in The Wrap here. “The Infiltrators” went on to win two Sundance awards.

If we want to change the world, we need to change the narrative, and the narratives and mythologies we believe in as a society are deeply embedded in our culture. That’s why it’s essential to have critics of color responding to that culture, amplifying powerful new stories and disrupting the problematic mythologies that many of us take for granted. Through the Critical Minded initiative, the Sundance Press Inclusion Initiative, and our partners and grantees, we are using all of our tools to nourish a diverse, sustainable and equitable cultural criticism sector.

“Critics can challenge us to become active audiences instead of passive observers, and at their best, critics of color reveal layers that would be invisible without their eyes,” Elizabeth Méndez Berry, director of our Voice, Creativity and Culture program, wrote in Hyperallergic. “Art is our mirror — in which we can confront our beautiful, our bad and our ugly. Critics refuse to look away, and they insist that we join them.”

At a time when hate and division are on the rise, we need critics’ voices now more than ever.