Genre
Synopsis
Therese Norgaard has built a life she loves in Kerala. She has meaningful research, a lush world far from where she started, and a girlfriend, Anu, who feels like home. At the Mattu Pongal festival, she paints a cow's horns in brilliant color while a priest waves incense over it a tradition of gratitude. She hasn't spoken to her father, Gabriel, a Minnesota dairy farmer, in five years. Therese felt the increasingly industrialized farming was inhumane and believed the honest thing was to let it go, and Gabriel simply couldn't. When an unknown Minnesota number calls, she knows before she answers.
She returns to Minnesota to find a farmhouse caked in grime, a suffering herd, and no father. The sheriff suspects exposure. The only familiar face is Uri, Therese's childhood friend and first love, hollowed-out and tending the farm because someone had to. The records tell their own quiet horror: even as Gabriel's finances collapsed and his mind came apart, he kept increasing the herd's feed. He was losing everything and still could not stop caring for the animals. The strangeness builds slowly. Water runs brown. A neighbor's daughter is found in the snow eating fistfuls of dirt. A cow collapses, its stomachs packed with sludge. The bloodwork comes back clean, and she knows that's wrong.
The mud returns to the floor no matter how many times she mops it. She finds Gabriel buried alive in the pasture, fingernails destroyed from clawing at the earth above him his ledger's last pages full of frantic sketches of ruined cattle. Beneath the barn she finds the source: years of biosolids fertilizer worked into the ground until the land itself turned toxic, hungry, alive. She tries to warn people. No one listens to a woman raving about poisoned milk in a farming town.
The land makes its final move the barn swallowed, the farmhouse flooding with mud through the floor and walls. Therese is pulled under, suffocating in the soil her family spent generations working. In the dark, a cowbell, Anu's voice, a life chosen instead of inherited and she claws back to the surface.She escapes with Cleo, a deformed calf born in the chaos, the one thing she couldn't leave.The film closes back in Kerala, at Mattu Pongal, Therese painting Cleo beside Anu. The camera finds Cleo's mouth. Mud drips from it, slow and dark.
Director Identity
Bio
Born and raised in Fargo, North Dakota, Elizabeth Chatelain is an award-winning documentary and narrative filmmaker. Her short documentary MY SISTER SARAH won the International Documentary Association’s Award for Best Student Documentary and was a Student Academy Award Finalist. Her films have screened at festivals across the country and the world, including SXSW and Interfilm Berlin. Her directorial feature debut, written by father and son Bruce and Abel Pavalon about a young person transitioning in small-town Minnesota, won the Prairie Spirit Award at the Fargo Film Festival. She just completed her second feature, LOVED ONE, which participated in the Women in Film/Sundance Institute Financing Intensive, was a Slamdance Screenwriting Competition finalist, and is supported by SFFilm.
Chatelain participated in the Berlinale Script Station and is a Showtime Tony Cox Screenplay Competition Winner and Atlanta Film Festival Screenplay Competition Winner. She is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a WIF/Black List Screenwriting Fellow and an NRDC/Black List Climate Storytelling Fellow. She holds an MFA in Film and Video Production from University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU-Tisch.
Awards History
2025 Mediterranean Film Institute Script to Film Lab - Participant
2024 Stowe Story Labs Writer's Retreat - Participant
