Founded in 2009, 13th Gen is the San Francisco-based film company of multi-award winning independent filmmaker MARC SMOLOWITZ. With three decades of experience in the film and media business, Smolowitz is a director, producer and executive producer who has been significantly involved in 50+ successful independent films wearing many hats across the entertainment industry. 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, Venice, Chicago, AFI Docs, IDFA, DOC NYC, CPH: DOX, Tokyo, Melbourne, Viennale, Krakow, Jerusalem, among others. 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 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. 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 by Ben Selkow (2015), HEAVEN ADORES YOU by Nickolas Rossi (2014), 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 TokyoInternational 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. Smolowitz is currently in production on two feature documentaries as a director/producer — THE G WORD, a film about giftedness, intelligence, and neurodiversity, slated for 2021 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.

ALIX WALL is an award-winning journalist who lives in the Bay Area. Last year, she won three first place awards in the American Jewish Press Association’s Rockower Awards; her latest in a long list of AJPA awards going back to 1997. She has also been recognized by the San Francisco Press Club and New California Media Awards. As a contributing editor to J., The Jewish News of Northern California, she writes a monthly column about interesting Jews in the food world as well as other features. She is also a regular contributor to The San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeleyside, The Forward and Edible East Bay. Alix also worked as a personal chef for over a decade and is the founder of the Illuminoshi: The Not-So-Secret Society of Bay Area Jewish Food Professionals, a networking group for Jews who work in the food industry. Alix is part of the Next Generations Speaker’s Bureau of the Holocaust Center of Northern California, for which she shares her family’s story with students. Alix is on the advisory board of Eden Village West, a Jewish farm-to-table summer camp, served on the executive committee of the Hazon Food Conferences for two years, and on the program board of the Berkeley Jewish Music Festival for four years. She very much appreciates the Jewish arts and is a regular donor and attendee of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Alix will be both writer and producer of the film and will conduct the interviews. She will also appear on-camera in the film as both a muse and a guide, helping viewers move from place to place around the globe as we investigate the power and reach of “Dos Elnte Kind.”

MICHAELLE STIKICH MCGARAGHAN has been editing films since she commandeered the family camcorder at the tender age of 14. Her first passion is working on documentaries with strong characters and fascinating stories. When she’s not directing her own work, or editing for companies like Disney/Pixar, Google and ITVS, she's screening films for festivals and hanging with her family. Her work has screened at South By Southwest, Sonoma International Film Festival, and on PBS and MTV.