Sean Mannion is a writer and director based in Boulder, Colorado whose narrative work has screened at festivals including SXSW Sydney, Fic Autor, and Dublin Underground. He has worked with commercial clients including Nike, Bitsbox, and Oskar Blues. In the piece below, he details how he shot his film The Threshing — about a young couple who enter the world of regenerative farming and uncover grisly secrets — on a real working regenerative farm in Colorado.—M.M.
In early 2020, my wife took a job at a regenerative farm at the foot of the Rockies. A regenerative farm, if you’re not familiar, is a farm that stresses harmony with nature to improve the health of the soil.
I went with her — not as part of the farm crew, but as a writer and filmmaker trying to find my way through a script I’d been struggling to finish. The place changed the way I thought about food, land, labor, and belief — and eventually, that change turned into The Threshing, a psychological horror film set on a farm much like the one where the idea was born.
Three years later, we returned to another working farm, Esoterra Culinary Garden, to shoot the film. From the very beginning, we knew we didn’t want to fake it. The goal was to embed the production inside a functioning ecosystem, and that meant working around its rhythms rather than imposing our own.
The farm’s owner, Mark DeRespinis, was incredibly generous. He not only gave us access to the land, but also helped us shape our schedule around the farm’s operational flow. Wednesdays and Thursdays were peak harvest days, so we kept our footprint light then. Fridays were delivery days to restaurants, so we tried to pack in as much as possible while the crew was off-field.
To keep from disrupting the crew’s workflow, we borrowed shade tents from a local brewery and set up our production headquarters and crafty beneath a row of trees, tucked out of the way. Mark also shared extra vegetables with our crew, helping us stretch our food budget and build a deeper connection to the place we were filming.
In a key sequence in the film, we see the lead character learning to trellis peas, surrounded by farm staff. The man teaching her in that scene was the actual farmer who taught our actor how to do it in real life.
Throughout the shoot, Esoterra’s farm staff worked with our cast, showing them how to speak confidently about vegetables and execute the kind of subtle physical actions—like harvesting greens or tying off rows—that can’t be convincingly faked. The result is a kind of lived-in realism that audiences may not consciously clock, but will definitely feel.
We shot during the rainiest June on record in Colorado, which meant we were dodging storms almost every day. There were no surprise frosts, but the rain came down nearly every afternoon like clockwork. It created mud, rescheduling headaches, and — honestly — some really beautiful atmosphere on camera.
Because the farm was active during daylight hours, we scheduled many of our shoots for the late afternoon and overnight, which gave the film’s night sequences a real-world stillness and eerie authenticity we could never have created on a soundstage.
The Threshing: Small Support, Big Impact
We were fortunate to receive support from Boulder County’s Agricultural Land Lease Program, which helped make our location access possible. We also partnered with Longmont Public Media, whose equipment lending program provided critical tools for getting the film made.
And through the MovieMaker Production Services program, we gained insight and infrastructure that helped us stay nimble on a microbudget.
The Threshing is a horror film, but the horror grows from soil we knew well. It’s about how systems — ecological, ideological, communal — can seem nurturing until they tip into control. That idea was born on a farm, and it needed to be shot on a farm.
My advice to anyone considering a location-based film like this? Don’t fight the place — let it shape the movie. Respect the rhythms. Eat the vegetables. Don’t schedule a big scene on a harvest day.
And don’t be surprised when your lead actor becomes the best radish picker on set.
The Threshing premiered in October at SXSW Sydney. We’re very proud to support the film through MovieMaker Production Services.
Main image: Esoterra Culinary owner Mark DeRespinis, with The Threshing director Sean Mannion and gaffer Corey Millikin. Photo by Hilla Eden, courtesy of The Threshing