Inspired by James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), for this contemporary study of rural poverty in America, Ross Spears and co-producer Silvia Kersusan spent three years with the family of Obea and Alice Glass, who live in Virginia in a bare-bones, self-made wooden house. The hardworking Glasses survive but they do not thrive. They are among America's disenfranchised; having inherited illiteracy and any number of diet-related diseases, they are somehow ineligible for government aid. Why, and precisely in what way, are the Glasses our business? This is the subject of Spears's film, and he offers Agee's prose as well as interviews with others who have inherited Agee and Evans's concerns, to examine the ethical issues in creating art from the misery of others. By implication and design, Spears opens his own work to the critique: within the film is the constant tension between its goal of compassion and awareness, and the medium itself, through which the Glass family is inevitably objectified. Their lives are rendered as surly as Alice renders the lard for an evening's meal, and whether they become more real or less human as a result is each viewer's decision to make.