So far Cheshire Ohio has screened at the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, the Frozen River Film Festival (Special Juried Award), Knoxville Film Festival (1st place documentary feature), Green Film Festival in Seoul, San Francisco Green Film Festival, Planet in Focus Environmental Film Festival, Columbus International Film and Video Film Festival (Free Press Award), Cleveland International Film Festival, Sustainability Film Series at The Athena Theater, Athens, Ohio, The Appalachian Studies Conference in West Virginia, Visualizing Appalachia: Appalachian Studies in the Digital Age, and at community screenings in Wisconsin, Ohio and Illinois.

A gun toting 83-year old woman refuses to sell her house to the power plant next door. But despite her refusal, the plant has moved ahead with their 20 million dollar deal to buy out most of Cheshire and bulldoze all the homes. What happened in this Ohio River town overrun by one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the world? A story of money, power and the increasingly difficult choices we face surrounding coal and the environment, Cheshire, Ohio makes us think twice about home.

Filmed over a decade, Cheshire, Ohio follows a community devastated by coal, starting with American Electric Power’s buyout and bulldozing of this Ohio River community after exposing them to years of harmful emissions, and then returning several years later to the now almost emptied town as we follow the case of 77 plaintiffs who have filed a lawsuit against American Electric Power for not protecting them from carcinogenic chemicals at the plant’s coal ash landfill site.

As the cycle of pollution from coal continues, we see how one town suffers from our reliance on carbon energy.