This film represents the perspective of vulnerable populations and our team is comprised of people who have direct experiences with projects that elevate voices from marginalized communities, while protecting their right to safe passage, shelter, and sustenance.

Set against the stunning backdrop of the American West, Up on the Mountain takes you to the confluence of immigrant rights, public lands, food politics, and the deeply committed subculture that has grown around wild mushrooms. While working as commercial mushroom pickers, Olivier Matthon and Michael Reis have packed cameras over several years in the migration over California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, and Alaska, capturing this largely invisible network of people working in rugged wildlands, carrying on the knowledge of an ancient food source.

 

 

In the late 1980’s, industrial logging and a liberalized Asian trade market radically changed many realities in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. With the disappearance of forest jobs that had been held by rural and migrant labor, people turned to new forms of income from the forest. Commercial mushroom picking, though elusive and largely unregulated, began to take off. It immediately attracted some of the most disenfranchised groups of society: Southeast Asian refugees from the Vietnam War who had difficulty finding work because of language barriers and discrimination, Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants escaping poverty from their countries only to be taken advantage of by U.S. employers, unemployed rural Americans facing the decline in the logging and fishing industries, and back-to-the-landers who didn’t fit in the growing tech and service sector lifestyle. Having little to lose, they took to the woods. They created a subculture of outcast gatherers who depend on a deep knowledge of nature and, most importantly, on one another.

 

 

For decades now, mushroom picking has experienced increasing controversy. Despite ample evidence of the sustainability of the harvest, critics of the industry have targeted commercial mushroom pickers and denied them access to public forests. While the Forest Service continues to subsidize the timber industry with large-scale logging contracts, the agency remains underfunded and lacks the staffing to adequately respond to newer commercial entities, like mushroom harvesting. As a result, a timber company can clearcut an entire forest from which a mushroom picker has been banned. Forest managers often find themselves overwhelmed by the sudden annual arrival of hundreds of independent pickers, seeking to harvest mushrooms on public land. Commercial mushroom pickers are often confronted by federal agents deep in the forest, far from support. Stories of racial profiling, anti-immigration, and elusive, discriminate rule-making regularly put mushroom pickers in unsafe situations.

 

 

And still the demand for wild mushrooms continues to grow. With new restaurant markets expanding—following the increase in urbanization of the American West—migrating mushroom pickers are often the only source for distributors. Unlike other harvested food, many of the desirable types of mushrooms are not responsive to cultivation or realistic agricultural products. Knowing where to find and how to identify the correct, edible species is a shared practice and carries back hundreds of generations.

 

 

Up on the Mountain highlights the stories of three groups of commercial mushroom pickers as they travel into the forest and up on the mountains. Filming has already begun and will be completed by the spring of 2019, representing the four seasons of picking. The funds from this campaign will be essential support in the completion of filming. All funds raised above our goal will go towards the next phase of editing.

 

For more information, visit our website, and watch our 3-minute teaser below: