Hand Rolled: A Film About Cigars is a feature length documentary on the artisanal craftsmanship of premium cigars, and the beautiful people that are involved in the process! You might have thought that cigars are factory made like cigarettes, but in actuality, over 300 pairs of hands are involved in the making of each and every premium cigar. This is a truly one of the last remaining industries that manufactures 100% hand made products and uses only 3 ingredients to do so: tobacco, distilled water for fermentation, and vegetable based glue to hold the wrapper on.

    Our background is in commercial filmmaking, but we’ve always prided ourselves on being able to tell stories through our videos. This is why we’ve decided to make our first documentary. We chose premium cigars is because we both smoked cigars and enjoyed the culture and figured that if we’re going to keep indulging, we should have our facts straight. Moreover, we did a little digging and saw that there really wasn’t any relevant and contemporary documentary on the premium cigar industry, so we decided to change that! 

We want to tell the human story.  Of course, we’ll include the lifestyle and consumption side of that story but we think it’s important to know that every cigar you smoke is the product of a labor of love of hundreds of individual people. There are millions of people worldwide who depend on the sale and distribution of premium cigars and their stories are seldom told.

    The documentary has been filmed thus far on a Red Epic-W camera and will be released in UHD 4k. Why is that important? Firstly, if you’ve seen any photos or videos from countries like Nicaragua, Dominican Republic or Cuba, you’ve seen how beautiful they are. We want you to be able to see every single detail of the locations we are filming! Also, by releasing it in 4k, we are future proofing it for many years to come!

    With the help of some private backers like Pete Johnson from Tatuaje Cigars, Daniel Marshall from Daniel Marshall Humidors, Nick Melillo from Foundation Cigars and the Sinners and Saints club, along with our own personal funding we’ve filmed in Nicaragua, where we interviewed some of the biggest names in the industry and some people you’ll have never heard from like farm workers from the fields. We’ve shot with manufacturers, celebrities and influencers in Los Angeles, Florida and Connecticut.

    We’ve got a total of about 50 interviews and hundreds of hours of footage! Here are some of the folks we’ve worked with so far:

We need to film in the Dominican Republic next. We have Carlito Fuente, Nirka Reyes, Litto Gomez and Manuel Quesada already lined up from the DR. We also need to film in Cuba, and the people we will be interviewing there are still TBD based on the access we are granted. Our goal is to premiere the film in July with the ultimate goal of getting it on a streaming platform like Netflix. 

    With $50,000, we will be able to travel to, and finish filming in the Dominican Republic and Cuba, as well as pay for our editor. Our remaining projected budget for the film is $150,000 which will include music licensing and all the post production work so any money we raise on top of the $50,000 will go directly to these things.

We also need your help in sharing about our project! Share our facebook page, our instagram page, our website, and of course this campaign. The more people know about the film, the more successful it will be when it gets released!