Marc Smolowitz is a multi-award-winning director, producer and executive producer who has been significantly involved in 50+ successful independent films wearing many hats across the film and entertainment business. The combined footprint of his works has touched 200+ film festivals and markets on 5 continents, yielding substantial worldwide sales to theatrical, television and VOD outlets, notable box office receipts, and numerous awards and nominations. His long list of credits includes films that have screened at top-tier festivals such as Sundance, Berlinale, AFI Docs, IDFA, DOC NYC, CPH: DOX, Tokyo, Melbourne, Viennale, Krakow, Jerusalem, among others.
In 2009, Marc founded 13th Gen, a San Francisco-based film company that 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 known widely for being active on some 10-15 concurrent projects, both independent and inside Hollywood, and it has successfully advanced Smolowitz’s career-long focus on powerful social issue films and filmmaking across all genres. In 2016, he received one of the prestigious IFP Fellowships to attend the Cannes Film Festival’s Producers Network and Marche du Film marking him as one of USA’s most influential independent film producers.
Since 2013, Marc has been the producer for legendary Black/Queer Writer/Director Cheryl Dunye. 13th Gen oversaw the 20th-anniversary restoration and re-release of her wildly influential first film THE WATERMELON WOMAN (1996), which included a special presentation at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2016, the film being acquired by the Museum of Modern Art for its permanent collection, and a worldwide screenings presence that has touched over 75 festivals. Together, they made the multi-award winning short film BLACK IS BLUE (2014), which is now slated to be expanded into a feature film. 13th Gen also recently optioned the book THE GILDA STORIES, a lesbian vampire novel by renown writer Jewelle Gomez, to be adapted into an episodic series for television with Smolowitz executive producing and Dunye serving as show runner and lead director.
As a producer, Marc’s recent work includes the following widely seen and award-winning films — PATERNAL RITES by Jules Rosskam (2018), 50 YEARS OF FABULOUS by Jethro Patalinghug (2018), THE NINE by Katy Grannan (2016), DESERT MIGRATION by Daniel Cardone (2015), BURIED ABOVE GROUND (2015), HEAVEN ADORES YOU by Nickolas Rossi (2014), among others.
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 2019, Marc is currently in production on two feature documentaries as a director/producer — THE G WORD, a film about giftedness, intelligence, and neurodiversity, slated for 2020 completion, 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.
Learn more about Marc’s work and his company 13th Gen at
13thgenfilm.com
