Independent film are showing up in unlikely global locations, thanks to the organizers of Film Forward.

A collaboration between two American entities, the Sundance Institute in Park City, Utah, and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Film Forward has so far taken 10 narratives and documentaries to China, Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco and Nashville, Tennessee.

Cherien Dabis, whose “Amreeka” concerns a Palestinian family relocated to suburban Illinois, got to screen her film in the Middle East for audiences that found its issues of ethnic differences reflected in their own communities. Peter Bratt, whose film “La Mission” deals with homophobia among American Latinos, encountered gay youths in Nashville who found hope through it.

Stanley Nelson, the longtime documentarian (“Wounded Knee,” “The Murder of Emmett Till”), showed his latest, the American civil-rights-era “Freedom Riders,” in Beijing. “Someone said, ‘Why was there segregation?’ ” Mr. Nelson recalled. “And it was such a beautiful question. ”

Film Forward is a complicated undertaking. It has required the coordination of the various filmmakers with more than a dozen foreign embassies, arts organizations and film schools, as well as the outreach required to remain diplomatic. “We’ve been finding people on the ground, helping us navigate their worlds,” and to set up the panels and master classes spun off from the film exhibitions, said Jill Miller, Sundance’s managing director. “ We’re not coming in and dominating everything.”

The program, with an annual budget of about $650,000, will not limit itself to works from Sundance’s labs or festival of independent films, the organizers said.

Keri Putnam, Sundance’s executive director, said the institute needed to expand its mission of finding and supporting new filmmakers. “This is a chance to take a curated batch of films and reach audiences that are not coming to Utah for 10 days in January,” she said of the annual film festival.

Directors can spend years and exhaust their credit-card limits to make films they’re passionate about, said Rachel Goslins, the executive director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

“Then you take them to film festivals, and they screen on the Sundance Channel, and maybe they have a theatrical release, but it’s a self-selecting audience,” said Ms. Goslins. But “when I screen a film to an audience that maybe has never seen a documentary before, or a film on a certain issue before, it’s so satisfying because you’re actually showing the film to the people you want to reach.”

For example, Ms. Putnam said that in Nashville, the city’s large Kurdish community saw ‘Son of Babylon,” Mohamed Al-Daradji’s drama based in Iraq. “It was the same in China and Turkey, and we’re looking forward to Kenya.”

Comparing Film Forward’s first months to “flying an airplane as you’re building it,” Ms. Goslins called the result so far “the kind of dialogue that our federal partners were looking for.” (Those partners - the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services - pay two-thirds of Film Forward’s annual budget; Sundance pays the rest.)

Exposure to such audiences can mean a certain anxiety. Lixin Fan - whose acclaimed documentary “Last Train Home” looks at the annual exodus 130 million migrant workers make from China’s cities for the New Year’s holiday - was grilled by his audiences in China about filming there without a permit; about whether the financing of the film was in any way political; and if it was made for Chinese or Western viewers.

And then there was the question that gets posed just about everywhere, in this case at the Beijing Film Academy. “They asked how to get their films into Sundance,” he said.