The film was adapted from a novel by Forrest Carter and is set in eastern Tennessee in 1935. The film proceeds as a series of closely observed incidents. Grandpa introduces Little Tree into the production and marketing of moonshine. Grandpa allows Little Tree a life lesson when Little Tree, to impress an Anglo sharecropper's daughter of his age, spends his first silver dollar on a con man's dying calf. A racist politician visits the church.
Grandpa is bit by a snake.
But his feature directing debut with this adaptation is less than fluent. He either didn't know what the film's important moments were, so that he could inflect them properly, or he was so committed to the integrity of the source material that he refused to play even once to the cheap seats.