ABOUT 13TH GEN

Founded in 2009, 13th Gen is a San Francisco-based film company owned and operated by multi-award-winning independent filmmaker Marc Smolowitz. With three decades of experience in the film and media business, Smolowitz is a director, producer, executive producer, and consulting producer who has been significantly involved in 50+ successful independent films.

Wearing many hats across the entertainment industry, the combined footprint of Smolowitz’s works has touched 250+ film festivals and markets on five continents, yielding substantial worldwide sales to theatrical, television, and VOD outlets, notable box office receipts, and numerous awards and nominations. In 2016, he received one of the prestigious Gotham Fellowships to attend the Cannes Film Festival’s Producers Network marking him as one of the USA’s most influential independent film producers.

His long list of credits includes films that have screened at top-tier festivals such as Sundance, Berlinale, Venice, Locarno, SXSW, Tribeca, Chicago, SFFILM, Thessaloniki, AFI Docs, IDFA, DOC NYC, CPH: DOX, Tokyo, Melbourne, Viennale, Krakow, Jerusalem, among others. Partnering closely with festivals around the world to advance the sales and distribution footprint of independent movies has been a major focus of Smolowitz’s success.

13th Gen works with a dynamic range of independent film partners globally to oversee the financing, production, post-production, marketing, sales, and distribution efforts of a vibrant portfolio of films and filmmakers. The company is talent-development focused, and we believe strongly in the power of social issue films and filmmaking across all genres. We are also committed to supporting the voices and stories of diverse filmmakers from around the world, and impact producing is a strong priority at the company.

Since 2014, 13th Gen’s Consulting Producer Services Program has worked with more than 70 filmmakers to achieve their goals in the global entertainment marketplace. One of the company’s core services is handling the worldwide festival release for films that Smolowitz is actively involved with as a producer, executive producer, or consulting producer. The company also handles world sales for a small selection of titles each year.

Smolowitz's recent work includes the following widely seen and award-winning films:

WHO I AM NOT by Tunde Skovran; COMING AROUND by Sandra Itainen; NARROW PATH TO HAPPINESS by Kata Ohla; HOLDING MOSES by Rivkah Beth Medow & Jen Rainin; BEING BEBE by Emily Branham; BALONEY by Joshua Guerci; LOS HERMANOS by Marcia Jarmel & Ken Schneider; SURVIVING THE SILENCE by Cindy L. Abel; SHIT & CHAMPAGNE by D’Arcy Drollinger; TRANSFINITE by Neelu Bhuman; PATERNAL RITES by Jules Rosskam; 50 YEARS OF FABULOUS by Jethro Patalinghug; KIM SWIMS by Kate Webber; THE NINE by Katy Grannan; DESERT MIGRATION by Daniel Cardone; BURIED ABOVE GROUND by Ben Selkow; and, HEAVEN ADORES YOU by Nickolas Rossi, among others.

Early in his career, he was a producer on Sam Green's THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND (Academy Award Nomination, 2003), and he produced San DuBowski's TREMBLING BEFORE G-D (2001), a film that has been called one of the top 100 documentaries of all time.

As a director/producer, his 2011 film THE POWER OF TWO premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival and went on to screen at 35 festivals around the globe, winning 10 major prizes, garnering theatrical release in the USA and Japan, and selling to Hulu in the USA and Netflix in Japan.

In 2023, Smolowitz is currently in post-production on two feature documentaries as a director/producer — THE G WORD, a film about giftedness, intelligence, and neurodiversity — and THE LONELY CHILD, a film about the unexpected present-day footprint of a little-known Yiddish lullaby that was written inside the Vilna Ghetto during the Holocaust. The latter has been developed, in part, through the Jewish Film Institute’s competitive Filmmaker-in-Residence programs in San Francisco.