Our new Tradwife film is live right now, as you read this. You could even click the link below and watch it right now to support Zandland and the work we do… imagine that?! The film takes us inside one of the most argued-about worlds on the internet: trad wives.
You’ve seen the videos even if you don’t know the name. The sourdough from scratch. The prairie dresses. The soft-spoken women explaining why they’ve left careers to serve their husbands and raise their children, filmed in kitchens that look like 1952 with better lighting.
What started as a niche aesthetic a few years ago is now one of the biggest cultural phenomena online. The biggest trad wife creators reach tens of millions of people. The hashtags run to billions of views. And the discourse around it has become a genuine front in the culture war: to some, these women represent everything feminism fought to free women from, repackaged with good lighting and monetised. To others, they’re the only people brave enough to say that the modern deal, the career, the commute, the childcare bills, the exhaustion, isn’t actually making women happy.
Everyone has an opinion. Almost nobody has actually spent time with the people living it.
So considering that’s our whole thing here at Zandland, that’s what we did. It’s part of a two-part special on our YouTube, one following a prominent influencer in the US and one in the UK.
In Part One, which was released today (Part Two will be out on September 15th), we spend time with Savanna Stone, one of the most prominent trad wife creators in America. She’s 21, married at 18, and she says things on camera that really do push the overton window… That women shouldn’t have the right to vote. That consent doesn’t exist within marriage. That feminism is the biggest lie women have ever been sold. She said all of it to millions online, and then she said it to me, whilst doing her makeup in the mirror, on the biggest week of her career.
I went in trying to understand the woman behind the persona. Whether she actually believes what she says, what her marriage really looks like up close, and why this message, of all messages, has found such an enormous audience. In the doc, we meet her husband and her team, as we follow her as she’s about to speak at Turning Point USA’s Women’s Leadership Summit. It’s a major, mainstream moment for Savanna. We see inside the Savanna-verse, see what the life involves, what she believes, why she chose it, and what it’s like to live inside a movement that some of the internet celebrates and a lot of it despises.
And underneath it all I had one main question…
Does she actually believe all of this? Or is it a way of building a profile?
And the answer turned out to be stranger than either. Because as the week went on, it became clear that Savanna isn’t doing this alone. Behind her sits an operation: a manager, a strategy team, a content machine pushing her message to tens of millions of people a month. And behind all of that, a millionaire investor who says he helped build Andrew Tate’s infamous War Room.
What started as a film about one woman’s controversial beliefs became a film about the machine amplifying them, and about what happens when a belief system is also a business. I went in with one question and came out with a much bigger one, and honestly, I’m still surprised by what we learnt…
As with everything we make, I tried not to arrive with a verdict. My wife is not a trad wife, she is a war correspondent and that probably couldn’t be more different… But I wanted to take this at face value. This is a world that gets judged very loudly and understood very little, which is exactly the gap Zandland exists to fill. If you come to this film expecting a takedown, or expecting a celebration, you’ll probably leave with something more complicated than either. That’s the point. We do the listening and you can draw the conclusions.
The film is on our YouTube now. The first hour is when YouTube decides whether a story like this travels, so watching now, commenting, even just letting it play, will help us get 3 trillion views. Also, please comment, share your thoughts, ask me questions… and I’ll update you when Part Two is out.
In some other news…
We won Best Documentary at the Edinburgh International TV Festival! Which is pretty great…
I’m slightly late to the party on this one, and sadly I couldn’t be there on the night as I was doing an event in Copenhagen. I never seem to be in the room for the awards we win, which is becoming a running joke at this point. But Grace Evans from our team accepted the award for Breaking Ranks, and what she said on that stage is definitely worth repeating:
“Earlier this year, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry published its report finding that Israeli forces had deliberately targeted children in Gaza. The testimony from Breaking Ranks was cited in that report, by name, three times. The findings from our film were used by a UN investigation to conclude that children were being deliberately targeted in Gaza. Those words are now part of the official record. That is what documentary filmmaking is for.”
I couldn’t put it better, so I won’t try.
It meant a lot to win that award, which is available to watch on our YouTube here…
Thank you to everyone involved: Matan Cohen, Maya Rostowska, Josh Reynolds, Rhiannon Mayor, Ben Mulley, Ben Lister, Grace Evans, Adam Mitchenall, Saif Ur-Rehmaan Manzoor-Khan and Katie Appelbe. Thank you to Tom Giles and Andrew Dagnell at ITV for commissioning it. And above all, thank you to everyone who spoke to us for the documentary. It cost them something to tell the truth.
Here’s me being in Copenhagen instead of accepting a really important award for Zandland:
If someone forwarded you this, you can subscribe at newsletter.zand.land. And if you’ve already watched the film, I’ll see you in the comments.
Thanks for reading.
Ben Z