¡Lights, Camera, Acción!

Emmy Award-winning producer (and college professor) Stephany Slaughter ’94 directed a new documentary on Michigan’s agriculture that is winning accolades at film festivals. 

Even while pursuing her academic career as a professor of world languages and cultures, Stephany Slaughter ’94 has helped to produce five films, and last year, she released her first as director. 

The documentary about farming and the people who keep our food system operating, Did You Guys Eat? / ¿Ya Comieron?, has been collecting awards and sparking conversations at film festivals throughout North America since it premiered in June of 2025. Among its many accolades, the film has won the audience choice award for documentary feature at the SOO Film Festival, an excellence award from the Hispanic International Film Festival, best feature cinematography from the Grand Rapids Film Festival, and best international feature at the Bajío Film Festival in Querétaro, Mexico.

The movie focuses on Michigan’s agricultural industry, which is second only to California’s in crop diversity, but it offers an intimate portrait of farming that would be familiar to farmers and farm workers anywhere in the United States. The filmmakers take a broad approach to their subject, following people who work across every aspect of the food system, from farmers and seasonal migrant workers to those who support them, whether in health care or social services. Through its expansive lens, the documentary highlights the challenges, pride, and reality of working to provide the food we all eat.

Besides being an award-winning director and producer, Slaughter has taught languages since graduating from Washington College with double majors in English and Spanish, first teaching English at the University of Paris for a year, then teaching Spanish and French at Eastern Technical High School in Baltimore.

In graduate school, she studied and taught literature and theater written in Spanish, teaching culture as much as language. After earning her doctorate at The Ohio State University, she undertook a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City before taking a tenure-track job at Alma College in Michigan, where she is now the Charles A. Dana Professor of Spanish.

“Cultural studies asks how any given topic shows up in different kinds of cultural productions. It’s a really elastic thing to look at because you can think about the cultural topic and ask how it is represented in theater, film, literature, speech, music, or any media,” Slaughter said of her field and the way it connects with filmmaking. “Having a background in language allows me to do that in other languages. It opens some doors and possibilities, and then having spent time in Mexico and studying different artists and scholars based in Mexico and in other areas of Latin America helped me gain an appreciation for the topic of immigration.”

For 10 years, Slaughter has volunteered with the Mid-Michigan Migrant Resource Council, and the connections she has made there provided the backdrop for Did You Guys Eat? / ¿Ya Comieron? The project really began with two other faculty members at Alma College talking about what they could propose for a grant opportunity to make a film looking at something related to health in Michigan. Slaughter suggested health care outreach to migrant workers as a topic.  

Through the Migrant Resource Council, Slaughter knew Jesse Costilla, migrant program director for Great Lakes Bay Health Center. Costilla was responsible for taking a mobile clinic out to farms to provide health care to agricultural workers. Putting her faculty colleagues in contact with this health care outreach worker was Slaughter’s first contribution to the effort, but not her last. 

Soon after their grant was approved, the filmmakers faced an unforeseen challenge when Costilla considered leaving the field, leaving them without the film’s expected protagonist. Then, the two faculty members with whom Slaughter began the project also scaled back their involvement, and she was left with a funded grant, the deadline that came with it, and a need to reconsider exactly what story her film would tell.

Luckily, Slaughter is no stranger to finding a way to get a film made when things get hard; she won an Emmy in 2009 as part of the production team on Which Way Home, which she volunteered on while she was in Mexico after funding ran out at one point. 

On Did You Guys Eat? / ¿Ya Comieron? her connection to the migrant resource council and her own academic focus on immigration meant she still had many connections with migrant workers and others. She also still had a supportive community at Alma College, including a former student, Nick Wracan, who became an instructor at the school and volunteered to be the film’s director of photography. Wracan came from a farming family and suggested the film broaden its scope by including growers as well as workers. 

Wracan recruited the farmers—his wife, father-in-law, and grandfather-in-law are all in the film—and Slaughter made sure to interview a wide variety of farmworkers, men and women, in English and Spanish. From the first steps through the finished film, the whole process took three years and yielded 200 hours of footage that would ultimately be distilled into the 60-minute documentary. As Slaughter and her team interviewed people involved in various aspects of the food system, they discovered similar issues and understandings from people doing different jobs and uncovered what became the guiding principle of the documentary.

“When we talked to people, there were a lot of people who were proud of the work that they do, and the work itself is harder and more skilled than many people understand,” Slaughter said. “We wanted to try to hit that combination of people work hard, and they’re proud of their work, and also there are some things that could make this easier.” 

Health care for agricultural workers and the farmers remained an important theme in the film, but thanks to the creativity, flexibility, and readiness to learn shown by Slaughter and her team, the film became about the entire community of people involved in growing and providing our food.

This emphasis on community continued as the documentary worked its way around the film festival circuit, showing throughout Michigan and from Pennsylvania to Oklahoma. After noticing at early screenings that audience members asked more about farming than filmmaking during the question-and-answer session, Slaughter began encouraging organizers of festivals to include local farmers, health care workers, and migrant services professionals on their panels at film showings.

“People want to know about pressures around farming. People want to know about services,” she said. “They want to know what workers need in their area.”

Slaughter and her collaborators hope the film festival screenings will help them find a distributor who can help their work reach a wider audience. (They kept it to 60 minutes partially because having PBS pick up Did You Guys Eat? / ¿Ya Comieron? would be a dream scenario.) But Slaughter notes that the desire from audiences to understand how the food system works in their own area and to help the people who are a part of it has already been rewarding.

“I’m really pleased that the film is able to start some conversation,” Slaughter said, “to bring people together in a room to think a little bit about food processes and the people who help us eat.”
—Mark Jolly-Van Bodegraven