About DUST BUDDY

In early 2020, I became haunted with a mysterious image: a farmer, alone in a room, staring down a robotic vacuum. Over the next year, the image turned into a script, and the script into a plan. In September 2021, a small crew of filmmakers and I piled into three cars and a box truck and headed out to a one hundred acre farm in southwestern Wisconsin. Four days later we returned to Chicagoland having shot my debut short film, Dust Buddy.

While corporate mega-farms swallow up more and more of America’s cropland, medium-sized farms – the kind that Reese operates in Dust Buddy – have become just about impossible to make a living off of. The classic American political narrative— “you get out what you put in”—is especially untrue in the agricultural world. Farmers’ livelihoods depend more on oil prices, interest rates, and embargoes than they ever do on “hard work.”

That being said, to call Dust Buddy an elegy doesn’t quite do it justice. It is also a curious and comedic film that engages with a crop of universal themes: how we deal with problems that are bigger than we are; how we relate to personal technology; and the joys and sorrows of living alone. And, of course, the most universal question of all: does that Roomba over there know what I’m thinking?

Thank you for watching,

Henry Sheeran
Writer, Director, Co-Producer