Dan Cogan, executive director of Impact Partners, said it was important now to let filmmakers know that “all perspectives are welcome.” His group invests in 10 to 12 documentaries a year — work that has ranged from the recent “Eagle Huntress” to the pronuclear “Pandora’s Promise.” He acknowledged that documentaries had become synonymous with correcting social ills, government malfeasance and the plight of the disenfranchised.

“But if you’re talking about marginalized groups, there’s no question the white working class should count among them,” he said. “So if there’s a filmmaker with integrity who comes from a red-state world and a red-state perspective and who wants to tell a different kind of story, I want to find that person and make a movie with them.”

What would that movie look like? In today’s America, one person’s social malady can be another’s sacred tradition, and feelings are easily bruised.

“It’s fabulous to know that the outside world has finally heard about us hillbillies and want to come down and help us,” joked the West Virginia-born filmmaker Mari-Lynn C. Evans. Her most recent film, “Blood on the Mountain,” may be exactly what Mr. Cogan, Ms. Jackson and others have in mind: a history of West Virginia coal mining that excoriates the coal industry, ennobles the coal miner and is told by someone from that culture.