A dramatic feature from Cine Manifest, Over-Under, Sideways-Down explores the politics of everyday life in America. The film centers on a working-class couple, Roy and Jan Stennis (played by Robert Viharo and Sharon Goldman), who live, with their two children, in a cramped tract home. An assembly line worker in a steel plant, Roy entertains the escapist fantasy of moving from the local semi-pro baseball team for which he plays third base, to the big leagues. "It's just a matter of being in the right place at the right time," he figures. However, when Roy simultaneously loses his job (by being at the right place at the right time - coming to the defense of a black co-worker and thus being branded a trouble-maker) and his one chance to impress an interested baseball scout, his life begins to unravel. The strains on his marriage increase, intensified by Jan's decision to take a job, and Roy begins to isolate himself both from his family and his fellow workers.

The bittersweet story of young lovers caught up in a political struggle waged by farmers against the grain trade, the banks, and the railroads. Set in 1915–16 North Dakota, a largely forgotten era of American history.

The first segment of what would eventually be the Prairie Trilogy, about veteran North Dakota poet and socialist organizer Henry Martinson, who fought against economic exploitation. Martinson recounts the 1916 birth of the Socialist Nonpartisan League, his narrative accompanied by images shot by Nilsson’s own grandfather, Frithjof Holmboe.