2018 Filmmaker In Residence
THE LONELY CHILD is a feature documentary that tells the story of a little-known Yiddish lullaby “Dos Elnte Kind” written inside the Vilna Ghetto during the Holocaust. Almost 80 years later, the daughter of the girl in the song — Alix Wall — goes on a quest to find those keeping the song alive today, inviting musicians from around the world to perform their own interpretations of it. Through conversations and performance, the lullaby serves as a vehicle to explore themes of inherited memory and trauma, music and art as resistance, and the song’s surprising relevance today as we are losing the last living Holocaust Survivors. What starts as a personal family story of discovery about Holocaust resistance becomes a large-scale music film that brings together artists and thinkers from different parts of the world around common themes.
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, Venice, 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 the USA's most influential independent film producers.
Project description and bios courtesy of the Resident