Pioneers is a portrait of industrial agriculture and new-age spirituality, focusing on the filmmaker's parents. It is also an unwitting self-portrait of an artist returning to the place he grew up, where he feels both the comforts of home and the alienating weight of the past. While Pioneers shows us remarkably different worldviews coexisting on the Great Plains, in the same bedroom, it also unravels complex facets of identity, belief, relationships: the ways we resist and inhabit one another.