Grants & Awards

About the Film:

Based on a groundbreaking book by the seminal punk author Jon Savage, Teenage is an unconventional historical film. Tradition holds that teenagers, as we think of them, were born in the 1950s as rockers and beatniks.  In fact, all the basic tenets of postwar teen life—from consumer passions to emotional unrest—had been in place years before that. Teenage focuses on a less familiar period: 1900 – 1945, an era of incredible social change and tumult.  By 1945, the term “teenager” had been coined and its popular associations were understood across the globe.  Teenage is a film that ends with a beginning, charting the pre-history of modern teenagers, and showing how they came to captivate the world. The film will use actors to bring to life fascinating youth of the early 20th century—decadent Flappers of the Prohibition era; brainwashed Nazi Youth in Germany during World War II; and the brave young fans of Swing who opposed them. Mixing period-blurring recreations, a wealth of archival material, historical narration provided by Savage, and a contemporary soundtrack, Teenage will be a stylishly anachronistic documentary.  It is at once a rigorous historical survey and a visually explosive, pop meditation on the eternally cool figure of the teenager.

About the Filmmakers:

Matt Wolf (Director) was recently named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine and he is a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow.  His critically acclaimed and award-winning feature documentary Wild Combination, about the avant-garde cellist and disco producer Arthur Russell, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and played in over 60 international film festivals, museums, and cinemas, and was included on a number of “Top 10” lists of 2008.  The film was released theatrically in the US and UK, distributed worldwide by Plexifilm, and was broadcast on the Sundance Channel.  Matt has produced and directed short documentaries for The New York Times Magazine, the series “High Line Stories” for the Sundance Channel, and he recently co-directed documentary components of Jerome Robbins’ NY Export: Opus Jazz, a feature length dance film in collaboration with the New York City Ballet dancers and PBS Great Performances.

Jon Savage (Writer, Narrator) is the author of Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture 1875-1945, which was published and critically acclaimed in the UK, North America, and Germany in 2007.  His television writing credits include the BAFTA winning BBC Arena documentary, The Brian Epstein Story, and most recently the acclaimed Joy Division, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, is distributed by the Weinstein Company and the Works, and was awarded the UK Film Council’s Best Documentary Award at the 2008 Griersons.  After graduating from Cambridge he published a fanzine called London’s Outrage, and worked for Sounds, Melody Maker and The Face. His first book, The Kinks: The Official Biography was followed by England’s Dreaming, the award-winning history of the Sex Pistols, punk, and Britain in the late seventies. It was the basis for the BBC Arena documentary Punk and Pistols and is widely considered the definitive record of punk.

Jacqui Edenbrow produced the documentary Joy Division. Her latest film about rock, art, and religion as told by Depeche Mode fans and directed by Turner Prize winning artist Jeremy Deller, premiered at The BFI London Film Festival in 2008, and was released theatrically in the UK last year.

Ben Howe was a producer on Matt Wolf’s Wild Combination.  He recently produced So Young Kim’s critically acclaimed and award winning Treeless Mountain (nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, Berlin, Toronto and Pusan film festivals) and Bradley Rust Gray’s The Exploding Girl (Berlin, Tribeca).  Both films were released theatrically by Oscilliscope. Other credits include Cruz Angeles’ Don’t Let Me Drown (Sundance) and David Barker’s Daylight.

Kyle Martin was a producer on Matt Wolf’s Wild Combination.  He was recently named the 2010 Sundance Institute Mark Silverman Producing Fellow.  His latest projects include the SXSW award winners Tiny Furniture, directed by Lena Dunham and released by IFC Films and New York Export Opus Jazz for PBS Great Performances.  Past credits include Jody Lee Lipes’ Good Times Will Never Be the Same

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