ABOUT THE FILM: Chris Pawelski has almost run out of time. As a fourth-generation onion farmer on the post-glacial black dirt of Goshen, New York, he is just one of millions of farmers in America facing the unnecessarily Sisyphean task of earning a living. Muckville follows the story of Chris’s family farm from the early 20th-century ‘Polish wave’ through climate change-driven crop failures in the 1990s and subsequent pitfalls of U.S. agriculture policy to his own resulting existential crisis. This short documentary provides rare insight into the impact of our national mental health epidemic on American farming and paints a delicate and emotional portrait of resilience and love amid unbeatable odds.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKER: Jeff Mertz is a multimedia filmmaker with an insatiable appetite for storytelling. For commercial and creative projects alike, he aims to evoke and explore the junction of physical and emotional landscapes, and is increasingly interested in creating works that foster understanding around how large-scale paradigms exist and persist at human scale. When he is not making images, Jeff is an avid hiker, gamer, and amateur chef.