Papaw Land

Papaw Land is an independent movie written and directed by Justin Blake Crum of Conway (Faulkner County). Set in the Arkansas Ozarks of the 1990s, the movie was filmed primarily in and around Leslie (Searcy County) during the summer of 2018 with an all-Arkansas cast and was released onto various streaming platforms in 2023.

The movie opens with Christy (Spring Hunter) driving her high school–aged son Matthew (Carson Mitchell) to visit her father, with whom Matthew will be staying for a while during the summer, as his mother is worried that he “is heading down a bad path.” Papaw (John Stiritz) lives on a plot of land in the hill country. On the drive, Christy confesses that when she was growing up, after her mother died, her father soon “treated me more like a wife than his daughter.” Ready to “get the hell out of there,” she got pregnant by her boyfriend at age sixteen.

Matthew is visibly bored by life in the country. He hangs out with his cousin Robbie (Tyler Winn), spending a night with him and a younger girl named Emily (Larissa Ware) drinking and swimming, after which Robbie takes sexual advantage of Emily. Robbie’s mother, Paula (Heather Steadham), tells Papaw what happened, and when he tells Christy, she is determined to come and get Matthew within a few days.

Matthew sees Emily the next time they are at church and follows her outside and to the church basement during a prayer service. He tells Emily that Robbie “doesn’t like you in the way that you like him.” Matthew then tells Emily that he really likes her and begins kissing her. Out in the parking lot, Papaw sees an upset Emily emerging from the basement and confronts Matthew.

Christy arrives to pick up her son, and they start to fight. When she leaves his room, he begins to break things in a rage, and she drives off without him, staying the night in a motel. The next day, as Matthew is packing up, Papaw confesses that when he was young, his own father drunkenly threatened his life, leading Papaw to join the army, as a means of getting away. He tells Matthew, “You’re a blessed young man—you just don’t know it yet.” Papaw then prays over Matthew, asking God to help Matthew avoid the mistakes he had made. Later, in a park, Christy tells Matthew that she is working to forgive her father, saying, “I’ve passed all my resentment and anger down to you, and I want to ask your forgiveness.” Back in his own bedroom, Matthew starts to take down all the posters covering the holes he had punched in the walls.

Crum wrote the movie based upon his experience growing up in Virginia, where he would spend summers with his grandfather in the mountains. He had studied film in Los Angeles before marrying a Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) native and later moving to Conway, where he worked for Arkansas PBS for four years. Screenwriter Graham Gordy praised Papaw Land as “a beautiful coming-of-age story about the seemingly universal experience of how family secrets resonate through subsequent generations.”

Papaw Land was screened at the Queens World Film Festival in New York, the Knoxville Film Festival in Tennessee (where it won Best Narrative Feature Film and the Audience Favorite Award), the Seattle Film Summit, the St. Louis International Film Festival, and the Richmond International Film Festival in Virginia. The movie made its Arkansas premiere on January 26, 2023, at the Central Arkansas Library System’s Ron Robinson Theater as part of the Arkansas Cinema Society’s Arkansas Filmmaker Spotlight Series. Later that year, it was made available to stream through several outlets.

For additional information:
Clancy, Sean. “Arkansas-Filmed ‘Papaw Land’ to Be Streamed.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, May 19, 2023, p. 1E. Online at https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2023/may/19/arkansas-filmed-papaw-land-to-be-streamed/ (accessed June 10, 2026).

———. “‘Papaw Land’ Examines Duality of a Grandfather.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, January  20, 2023, pp. 1E, 6E. Online at https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2023/jan/20/papaw-land-examines-duality-of-a-grandfather/ (accessed June 10, 2026).

“Papaw Land.” Internet Movie Database. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13844108/ (accessed June 10, 2026).

Pawpaw Land Official Movie Site. https://papawlandmovie.com/ (accessed June 10, 2026).

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas