Movies: Iowa

The solo actor in Shimmer tells the story by becoming each character in turn. The play takes place in 1956, in a harsh Midwestern juvenile detention center, where two boys befriend each other....

Set in the backwoods of rural Iowa, this is Regan and Addisyn's last summer after high school. Growing up next door to each other, the girls are as close as sisters. The two of them spend their summer detasseling corn at a local farm. Addisyn can't w...

Deep river valleys, tall limestone bluffs sawing through the sky… thousands of years ago, this unique portion of the Midwest escaped the crushing effects of the giant Ice Age glaciers. But with its scenic beauty, this preserved primal landscape also ...

Reverend Brooks leads his small Iowa town in a contest to stop smoking for a month. But some tobacco executives don't want them to win, and try everything they can to make them smoke. If townspeople don't go nuts from wanting a cigarette, or kill eac...

A teenage runaway and a widowed father each fight to take matters into their own hands to redeem their dark past....

A short film starring Vanessa Gisselle (Mayans MC) filmed in 2009. A minor slasher shot around Des Moines, Iowa....

A collection of personal anecdotes from those who have navigated through a tumultuous year in America....

On his family's farm in rural Iowa, young Jack Gudmanson is wrestling with his sexual identity, not an easy thing to do in the macho world of the Midwest. But things become clearer for him when he discovers via a rusty old lunch box filled with gay m...

In this experimental short film, Kristian Day collected artwork created by the public. He found the majority of the pieces at "Sharpie marker demonstration tables" and it took almost a year to collect the artwork. All pieces were created by chance wi...

A musical drama set in small-town Iowa, SAINTS REST tells the story of two estranged sisters, who over the course of one summer, form a connection through their shared love of music, as they grieve the recent death of their mother....

It's the end of the summer of 1994 and life is about to change for two boys on a farm....

Made exclusively for the Hail to the King Tribute Show at Finder Creepers in Des Moines, Iowa. A surreal and non linear adaptation of the short story "Jerusalem's Lot". It was shown for exactly one month from January 22nd, 2011 to February 22nd, 2011...

A short film collaboration between director Kristian Day and make up artist Patrick Boltinghouse. Patrick had created the make up for Pride Weekend 2010 in Des Moines, Iowa. After the parade, he called Kristian up explaining that he was in make up an...

The film tells the story of a woman reflecting on a painful part of her past as she writes. Although we do not see what she has written, we do see her broken memories....

State of Bacon tells the kinda real but mostly fake tale of an oddball group of characters leading up to the annual Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival. Bacon-enthusiasts, Governor Branstad, a bacon queen, Hacksaw Jim Duggan, members of PETA, and an envoy of ...

King Corn is a fun and crusading journey into the digestive tract of our fast food nation where one ultra-industrial, pesticide-laden, heavily-subsidized commodity dominates the food pyramid from top to bottom – corn. Fueled by curiosity and a dash o...

Denese Joy Becker, a manicurist living in Iowa, discovers she is indeed Dominga Sic Ruiz, a survivor from a 1982 Guatemalan massacre, when more than 200 people were killed in the small village of Rio Negro, after opposing the construction of a dam, s...

The Iowa State Fair draws millions of people to the city of Des Moines every year. However, this film is not about the Iowa State Fair or the people who attend. It's about where they park their cars. Inspired by the classic documentary, "Heavy Metal...

A documentary about an Iowa artist who made his career from two antique photo albums that he found in the trash. It has been four years since he originally found the two photo albums and since then he has had featured exhibits around the country. Thi...

What strange forces saved one isolated section along the Upper Mississippi River from the repeated crushing and scouring effects of glaciers during the last two million years? And what pre-Ice Age throwbacks survived here in this unique geologic refu...