One of the reasons families invest together is to unify the family — around investment goals, but also around a set of broader goals and values. As wealth is handed down through the generations and families get larger, though, it can be difficult to preserve that sense of unity. One way families try to pass on their values is by making sure future generations know their story.
Silvia Costa works with families on one way to do this: a legacy film. Costa, a veteran CNBC producer who spent two decades producing business profiles for broadcast channels in Europe and Asia including EuroNews, CNBC and Star TV, now works for R360, a membership organization for ultra high net worth families. Since joining R360 three years ago, she has made 17 30- to 45-minute legacy films for R360 members.
“A legacy film is a documentary not just about the member and the member’s life, but about their family,” Costa says. “The first thing I say to them is, ‘You’re talking to the generations that you will never meet.’”
This was the motivation for Hillel Presser, an attorney and businessman/entrepreneur, to work with Costa on a legacy film.
“For me, this video is a legacy: not just for my kids — hopefully I’ll be around a long time and can teach them — but for future generations. I want them to know what’s important to us. How did we get where we are today? What’s important to the family? What are our values?” Presser said. “I wish I could have seen a video of my great-great-grandfather. I never met my dad’s dad – I don’t even know what he was like.”
An in-depth process
To make the films, Costa spends time researching, converting family movies, digitizing old family photos, scanning trust papers and deeds, adding animation, and using drones to get pictures of the locations where they’re filming. The package includes three days of filming in two U.S. locations – families can pay for overseas locations or extra days. Recently Costa — who speaks five languages and has recorded interviews in French, Portuguese, and Spanish as well as English — and her crew went to Greece to film a little village for a family with roots there.
Costa may interview the member’s parents or even grandparents — as well as their children, depending on their age. She sometimes interviews family friends or business partners.
Presser’s film included interviews with his father, his wife and children, his in-laws, friends (including a childhood friend whom he has known for over 40 years), and people he has worked with. Filming took place in New York and Florida: “The New York part was the past, and the Florida part was today,” he says.
In New York, crews filmed locations including Presser’s high school, his old house, the local grocery store, and the cemetery where his mother is buried. In Florida, they filmed at the family’s house in Boca Raton and on Presser’s boat in Miami.
“I had them sit down with my father in New York. I lost my mother early to Alzheimer’s, and my father was really the only one left with all the stories. It was really important to get the values, family stories, and past family history from my father,” Presser says.
Varying goals
Each family chooses the topics for the film to focus on: such as their heritage, for example, or values or business lessons. For many families, the story of current business success isn’t the only story.
“It’s not the one business that made them wealthy – it’s the businesses of before, the struggles of before that led to success. They are more concerned about passing on the values of hardship than success,” Costa says. “They are talking to their children and their children’s children. Of course they will know about the success. What they don’t know are the struggles that came before. And sometimes it’s not just struggles but the ups and downs of life.”
Chris Shonk, a tech entrepreneur based in Crested Butte, Colorado, who is now an investor, says he views his family’s legacy film as “genealogy meets family history meets legend meets lore. We wanted to wrap that all up and make it a gift to our children.”
He wanted to have the documentary made now, since both his parents and his wife’s parents are alive and healthy. The goal, he says, is to explain to future generations: “Who are we, what do we as Shonks stand for, and where did we come from?”
Some films about family enterprises are “heavy on the patriarch and the business they built,” Shonk says. “We didn’t want anything to do with that. There’s already enough of a shadow cast on these kids by the Gen 1s. We didn’t want to do anything that would debilitate our kids – ‘What if I never build a business as big as Dad’s?’ We wanted to just make it about life: who we are, what we stand for, how to live a life of meaning and purpose. It’s not about money, it’s not about power.”
New perspectives
Delving into family history can turn up new stories — or new perspectives on old ones.
“People remember stories in different ways,” Costa says.
For example, one R360 member’s father went through a bankruptcy decades ago. His brother was interviewed for the family’s legacy film and said the bankruptcy destroyed their family. But the member, who had been away at college when it happened, did not remember it the same way.
“For him, the fact that his father went bankrupt pushed him to want to do better – he had to pay for his college fees,” Costa says. “Whereas the brother was distressed, trying to make ends meet at home.”
The members have control over the content – Costa sends them the film and asks if they would like anything changed. But she says they rarely ask for changes, even when the story, told by others, is not what they were expecting.
For Shonk, the process of making the film brought to light family stories he hadn’t known.
“I only knew some stories here and there. This really put a deep dive on my parents: photos, family stories, immigration on both sides. Everybody was in the military in some form or other, and we learned about different battles and acts of valor and service,” Shonk says. “I also learned about some family tragedies: Back then there was a lot of infant mortality and adversity in things we now consider the basics, and life expectancy was low.”
Costa says most families keep the films private when they receive them, perhaps showing them to other family members and close friends. The real audience is future generations. To make the record more complete for this audience, both Shonk and Presser say they hope to update their films in future years.
