In 2024, filmmaker Jacob Hatley released crime drama Rowdy Friends, a tale featuring a mixture of professional and non-actors set in rural North Carolina. This film centered J.D. Cranford playing a version of himself after he left prison and went to a halfway house. He unexpectedly discovers himself on the hunt for a missing member of the house when no one seems to care that he’s gone missing. Cranford is magnetic in the film and, it would seem, that the 2024 film was not the first time that Hatley and co-writer Tom Vickers would work with Cranford as, several years before, Hatley and Vickers worked as co-directors on a documentary set between 2015 – 2017 in which Cranford is one of these subjects. This film, Clovers, is part of the Breakout section of Slamdance Film Festival 2026 and follows three different Asheboro, N.C., people as their lives intersect socially and personally, their choices carrying with them a powerful sadness brought upon by a self-made inevitability.
Prison Officer Jennifer Paschal loves going to work and joyfully does her job at the Randolph County Prison until she’s fired a few months into 2016. As a means to pay bills, she starts working for her brother operating one of his several sweepstakes businesses — a choice meant to be a brief stopover before her next opportunity. One of the regulars is Sharon McNeill, a high school-educated, middle-aged woman who loves to play an interactive fish game. She shares a son with J.D. Cranford, a veteran of the U.S. Navy. Connected by Clovers, the sweepstakes facility Paschal operates, Hatley and Vickers raise interesting questions about the ways in which we are the builders of the chains we believe hold us down.
Driven by a cinema verité style, Hatley and Vickers imbed the audience into the lives of Paschal, McNeill, and Cranford for a brief period asking one distinct question, “how does one live a satisfied life when things don’t go the way you expect?” The difference between the version of Paschal at the start and the version the end is distinct, a clear schism of self having occurred. In December of 2015, she’s joyfully talking about work while Hatley and Vickers show us moving through the prison. It’s not particularly clear what her job is, but she’s generally friendly to the inmates (and they her), suggesting it’s not about power for her but an interest in rehabilitation. This is inference-based given that Paschal tells us that she first learned of this job while in school for criminal law and found out the prison was hiring, a notion that tells us that she has a drive to improve her life (going to school at non-traditional age), which makes the loss of her job all the more devastating. Adding another level of shit on top is the fact that the casino-adjacent facility she helps manage is only as legal as local law enforcement decides it is, her stating for us more than once that Clovers stays in operation as long as local cops are ok with it. Instead of working within the justice system in a job she loved, she’s now at the mercy of whether or not Asheboro PD thinks the place is skirting the law or not through its operations. To make matters even worse, there’s a question as to whether local law enforcement that does allow operation will actual take seriously any threats of violence or theft that occur related to the operation. Over the course of the runtime, we observe someone who went from a fulfilling career to a job that their old occupation disregards. Hatley and Vickers don’t present Paschal as resentful and rarely anything less than cheery, which makes the realization of these individual notions, peppered throughout the documentary, start to feel like an anchor around her feet that she may never be able to remove. It’s disheartening as hell and it’s not because of something she’s done. It brings to mind the crushing quote from Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987 – 1994) in which Patrick Stewart’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard remarks that, “… one can do everything right and still lose.”
Jennifer Paschal in the documentary CLOVERS. Photo Credit: Pioneers of the New West. Photo courtesy of Slamdance.
Whether with Paschal, McNeill, or Cranford, the filmmakers don’t pass judgement, allowing their words and deeds to speak louder. This means capturing them at work, at home, and elsewhere. With Paschal and McNeill, this often means a more traditional approach utilizing talking head interviews, cameras in vehicles, or just recording them at Clovers or at home, as appropriate to their story. Where many documentaries tell you precisely what their film is about, Clovers is something that you must watch and ruminate on in order to properly grasp because of the use of cinema verité. The filmmakers aren’t going to tell you who their subjects are, rather, they are going to allow the subjects, through word and deed, do that for them. This allows us to understand the depth of frustration that Paschal feels about being so close to a dream and losing it versus McNeill who gets so close to understanding that her choices within the social system are what has led her to seeking freedom via gambling and not the system itself which holds her down. It’s here that audiences, of any political affiliation or mindset, should express caution with letting their biases get in their way while watching Clovers. Within a section focusing on McNeill and incorporating Cranford, they and two others watch the 2016 election as it unfolds and politics are discussed. Here, McNeill unintentionally illustrates how ignorance can lead to shaping a worldview in the way she presumes the Electoral College is comprised of college students and how she excuses accusations of impropriety thrown against then-candidate Donald J. Trump but blasts then-candidate Hilary Clinton for her involvement in her husband’s activities. In this section, as the four watch the results come in, McNeill makes statement after statement that crafts a version of the world in which her dreams can’t come true because of choices made in the halls of government against her while, at the same time, not considering how her rebellious choices as a young adult led her to a position in which she must rely on someone else to pay her bills. As much as one feels for Paschal whose choices are made in full awareness of where she is and what she seeks to do, one also feels for McNeill, who seems to be frustratingly unaware of her complicity in her current life.
As if in contrast to them both, there is Cranford.
Having seen Rowdy Friends first, it’s fascinating to see just how much of the real Cranford, seen here in Clovers, came through in his performance of J.D. in that feature. On the surface, Cranford is positively magnetic as someone who experiments with drugs and alcohol, who doesn’t regard consequences, and who perpetually explores how far he can take himself. The way that the filmmakers weave us into and out of the subjects’ lives, a larger picture forms in which Cranford could be described as a lost soul, unable to process the pain he’s experienced, the chase of the next high being what gets him to the next day. Unlike McNeill, Cranford not only appears to be aware of his contradictions, he embraces them and rarely apologizes for them. He doesn’t seem to quite get why he keeps being pulled back to Asheboro, yet that doesn’t stop him from considering other concepts and perspectives. We don’t know where he falls politically (and it doesn’t matter), but hearing him discuss politics with McNeill does give one pause as he articulates the apparent weaknesses within then-candidate Trump that the October Surprise of 2016 (Hilary Clinton’s emails) blinded most to. This is but one example of the contradictions on display within Clovers that speak to the intention of the filmmakers as presenting the complexities of the human condition.
Ultimately, people want the lives they think they deserve and will do what they can to make them happen. That said, what they think they deserve and what they tell people can run opposite one another. Add to that an economy in which full-time work can be rare in certain sectors, a lack of desire to put in the effort to be qualified, and/or a tendency toward self-destruction and … well, the steps to get to the life we deserve can grow marred by our own self-sabotage. It’s impressive how little judgement Hatley and Vickers place upon their subjects, opting to let what they record and how it’s presented do the job for them. It raises questions that it doesn’t necessarily answer and, frankly, that appears to be by design. Much in the same way Rowdy Friends makes one look inward at the risks we’re willing to take to clasp the rewards we want in life, Clovers does much the same without the manufactured drama.
Life is a series of choices whose consequences make up your present moment, which, in turn, provides another set of choices. What consequences go too far for you? At what moment is enough enough and is motivation to improve possible? What does it all matter if you don’t care about the outcome? This is what we grapple with throughout Clovers and what we take from it is up to us.
Screened during Slamdance Film Festival 2026.
For more information, head to the official Slamdance Film Festival Clovers webpage.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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