ABOUT THE MOVIE
Every summer, nearly a million people pour into the Iowa State Fair. To get there, they have to pass through a different kind of attraction: a neighborhood of “parkers” who turn their yards into improvised parking lots, hustling twenty-dollar bills out of SUVs, pickups, and minivans.
PARKERS follows this assorted crew of families, lifers, and loudmouths through eleven blistering days of traffic, drunks, “parking wars,” and surprise tenderness. There are fake hundred-dollar fishing lures, measured‑to‑the‑inch lawn grids, guns worn “just in case,” grandmas turning 86 on the curb, and neighbors who love each other almost as much as they drive each other crazy.
Funny, raw, and surprisingly emotional, PARKERS shows the Iowa State Fair you’ve never seen—the one happening just outside the gates, where a few square feet of grass can mean taxes paid, kids clothed, and one more year of hanging on.
10,000 cars a day
Every day, around 25,000 cars roll up to the Iowa State Fair. The fairgrounds can only take in about 15,000, which means roughly 10,000 more are left circling the nearby neighborhood looking for a place to park.
The neighborhood
For generations, yard parking
has been a part of the Iowa State Fair—
a micro‑industry rooted in tradition,
neighborhood culture,
and, for some families,
economic survival.
WHY MAKE THIS MOVIE
Hundreds of thousands of cars pull into the Iowa State Fair every summer, and most people only see a simple transaction: hand over some cash, park in a stranger’s yard, move on. For me, that simple moment became impossible to ignore. I kept wondering about the people who turn their lawns into parking lots—what kind of crazy things they must see, what drives them to do it year after year, how it shapes their families, and what this ritual reveals about who we are.
With PARKERS, I wanted to tell a story that hasn’t been told, about a world hiding in plain sight. These are ordinary Midwestern yards and ordinary Midwestern lives, yet behind every waved-in SUV is a set of motivations: financial necessity, tradition, pride, boredom, entrepreneurship, survival, or just the joy of being in the middle of it all. I was interested not in the spectacle of the fair itself, but in the people who quietly build a parallel economy one car at a time.
We’re living in a moment that feels increasingly loud, polarized, and exhausting. So much of what we see and hear insists on our differences—our politics, our zip codes, our timelines. PARKERS is my attempt to look in the opposite direction. By staying close to small talk at the edge of a driveway, to tired feet on a porch at midnight, to the awkwardness and warmth between parkers and drivers, I wanted to show that life is still mostly made up of tiny, human exchanges.
This film is about money and hustle, yes, but it’s also about connection: the way a “where you from?” at a car window can collapse distance; the way traditions get passed down in folding chairs and hand-painted signs; the way a temporary community reappears each August like clockwork. In focusing on the people behind the transaction, I hope PARKERS reminds us that beneath the noise of the world, there is still a stubborn, everyday sameness in what we want—dignity, security, belonging, and the chance to be seen.