Aggie Filmmaker Greg Kwedar ’07 Already Has Two Oscar Nominations Under His Belt. And He’s Just Getting Started.

Then there was the influence of rugby coach Craig Coates, who recruited Kwedar — a member of the United States Under 19 National Team — to Texas A&M.

Coates was just as focused on building young men of character as he was on winning matches. So when he learned of a Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, orphanage that needed help from volunteers, he packed up his players and headed south. For Kwedar, this experience proved life-changing in both immediate and unforeseen ways. That first trip became the jumping-off point for many subsequent trips, where he witnessed firsthand both the struggles and resilience of those living in impoverished border communities.

Kwedar couldn’t wait for his fellow students to have their own border experiences.
 

Kwedar’s father was in business for himself, and the younger Kwedar had spent his formative years creating his own work opportunities, ranging from DJing to window cleaning. Mays Business School was therefore an attractive option for the entrepreneurial-minded Kwedar, while the notoriously difficult five-year Professional Program in Accounting appealed to his competitive nature. Through this program, he planned to graduate with both a bachelor’s degree in accounting and a master’s degree in marketing.

The summer before his senior year, Kwedar traveled to New York City to interview for an accounting internship. He loved the city, but it was the Big Apple’s artistic energy — not the business environment — that excited him. His long-dormant desire to write began to simmer once again. A view from the window of a tall Financial District building into the hole where the World Trade Center used to stand increased that simmer into a boil.

“Looking down at ground zero from where I was standing, I felt the fragility of my life and the feeling that I not waste a minute of it,” he said.

Shortly after his New York interview, Kwedar flew to Sydney, Australia, to play rugby. When he wasn’t competing, he began writing again. Things moved quickly from there. Touring a Sydney film school led to a short gig as a film production assistant.
 

Opportunities for students to study film were still a couple of decades away at Texas A&M, but the knowledge Kwedar acquired from his business classes and the skills he attained through his extracurricular involvements formed a foundation critical to success in the business side of his chosen field. He points to both the Business Fellows program and the Business Student Council as vital parts of his development.

“I really flourished in the Business Student Council,” he recalled. “I started as a member and then planned the professional trip that we took to Seattle before becoming president my senior year. It was such a game-changing education for me to be responsible for an organization with a significant budget and so many objectives focused on benefiting business students.”

Kwedar’s post-graduation journey was a whirlwind of opportunities taken and difficult choices made. He began his storytelling in earnest, formed a close group of filmmaking friends — including Bentley — in his new hometown of Austin and turned down a scholarship to the prestigious New York University film school’s graduate program in Singapore. He not only continued with film projects for MarComm but also immersed himself among those whom society often overlooks in places where he felt stories needed to be told. He spent time with a community of single mothers in Guatemala who were striving to simultaneously gain an education and make ends meet. He volunteered with Rehabilitation Through the Arts, getting to know the incarcerated men inside Sing Sing.

“I'm really interested in stories of hard-won optimism that stand in the face of cynicism and that speak to our ability to see each other and to overcome the divides between us,” he explained. “I think that animates the spirit of a lot of the work that we do and often brings you into difficult environments to tell stories like that.”

The four feature films written by Kwedar and Bentley — along with the soon-to-be released “Saturn Return” — reflect this effort to facilitate understanding. It’s a mission that resonates in the in-depth character studies of the incarcerated men inside “Sing Sing” and their gradual transformations brought about through theater involvement. It’s present in the remote, breathtaking Pacific Northwest setting of “Train Dreams,” where logger and railroad worker Robert creates his own inner prison of loneliness, longing and regret. It’s seen in the character of Jackson coming to grips with the end of his professional life in 2021’s “Jockey,” and in the snowballing moral and ethical dilemmas faced by three U.S. Border Patrol agents in 2016’s “Transpecos.”
 

“I was already thinking, ‘Is there a better way to do this?’ I wouldn’t have contemplated this without the training I had at Mays.”

Through Ethos, Kwedar and Bentley strive to champion independent artists in the financing and production of their films. This involves an equitable financing model the creative partners developed and revolutionized, beginning with their second film together, “Jockey.” The model is built on parity and shared ownership.

In “Sing Sing,” for instance, A-list actor Colman Domingo worked for the same pay rate as the production assistants, post-production crew and each of the formerly incarcerated men who acted in the film. All 92 people who worked on the movie own it together.

“It was a big statement in our business that provided some life-changing financial support for a lot of the artists on ‘Sing Sing,’” Kwedar said.

The screenwriters’ efforts to highlight up-and-coming filmmakers received a significant boost in May: Netflix announced that the pair will not only develop and produce their own works for the streaming channel but will also finance and produce a slate of films from other independent filmmakers.

In terms of his film subjects, Kwedar’s desire to put a spotlight on the all-too-often overlooked has only grown as he looks toward future films.

“I think I recognized early on that with the privilege I grew up with came the responsibility to have an impact beyond myself, to do anything I could to serve the communities and people around me,” he explained. “I derive a lot of joy from it. The commitment to this kind of work just deepens the more you do it. I see the impact it has and how special the relationships are that I’ve formed from within these communities. It just encourages me to keep going.”