WGA East Registration #I381209
A Film by Ayla Demirci
Fifty pounds of copper, sixty Appalachian miles, forty-eight hours.
After government poison takes her husband and federal agents kill her father, a pregnant young widow has forty-eight hours to haul fifty pounds of copper through sixty miles of Appalachian wilderness—the only hope of giving her unborn child a future.
November 1928. A copper coil drips moonshine in the dark—the only clean liquor left in Appalachia. The government has been poisoning industrial alcohol for years. Thousands are dead. Thousands more are dying blind, seizing, clawing at their own eyes. Tommy Weaver was one of them. He was twenty-six. He was going to be a father.
His fiancée Birdie McCallister watches federal agents burn her family's still house to the ground. Her father Abel dies fighting—throws boiling copper and moonshine into Agent Harlan Beck's face before they gun him down. His last words to her: Run.
She runs.
Now Birdie is alone. Pregnant. Hunted by a disfigured federal agent who wants revenge. Her mother is dying of consumption. And hidden in a mountain cave sits the family's masterwork: a fifty-pound copper still worth two hundred dollars—enough for medicine, a train ticket west, and a life where her child won't inherit this violence.
She has forty-eight hours to carry it sixty miles to Knoxville. Through mountains that don't forgive. Past men who'd kill her for the copper on her back. With a lawman bleeding and raging somewhere behind her.
The only way out is through.
Sixty miles of ridge trails, river crossings, and hidden paths her father taught her. Birdie carries the copper strapped to her back—fifty pounds crushing her shoulders, driving into her spine with every step. She navigates by ridge lines, creek sounds, moss on tree trunks.
"Pure copper cleans the booze proper. Saves lives."
Between 1920 and 1933, the U.S. government deliberately poisoned industrial alcohol to discourage bootlegging. Over 10,000 Americans died. Thousands more went blind, seizing, clawing at their own eyes.
Tommy Weaver was one of them. Three days of agony. Birdie watched every minute.
Her father's copper stills weren't criminal enterprise. They were the only safe alcohol left. This wasn't about breaking the law. It was survival in the face of government-sanctioned murder.
"Some laws are worth dyin' for. This ain't one of 'em."
Agents surround the still house. Abel throws Birdie a pouch, commands her to run, then attacks Beck with boiling copper. Dies in gunfire. She counts nine shots from the trees.
Her father's ashes. Her mother dying. Forty-eight hours to get the copper to Knoxville. That money is medicine, a train west, a future.
The Nolichucky pulls her under. Let go or drown. She lets go. Finds it downstream. Keeps moving.
Shaw corners her outside Knoxville. Surrender or die. She runs. Wyatt covers her. Escapes with both stills.
Dying, Beck faces Birdie. She tells him about Tommy. His last words: "Some laws are worth dyin' for. This ain't one of 'em."
Deliver the copper or save herself. By the end, Birdie does both—then walks away. The copper is sold. The cycle is broken.
Abel died for principle. Beck died enforcing one. Birdie chooses differently: she'll finish what her father started, but she won't die for pride.
Prohibition killed thousands through poisoned alcohol, federal raids, and poverty. The film asks: who decides which laws are worth dying for?
The mountains aren't romanticized. They're beautiful, brutal, indifferent. The copper craft represents generations of knowledge, survival, and resistance.
THE LAST COPPER RUN resurrects a forgotten American atrocity.
Between 1920 and 1933, the U.S. government poisoned over 10,000 of its own citizens in the name of Prohibition. Most were poor. Most were rural. Most of their names are lost.
This film is a memorial—and a reckoning with how governments rationalize violence against the vulnerable, how principle becomes tyranny, and how ordinary people resist.
But it's also a survival story about a woman refusing to carry her father's war. Breaking generational cycles. Choosing life over legacy.
In an era re-examining government overreach and who decides which laws are just, THE LAST COPPER RUN feels urgent.
Winter's Bone – Appalachian realism, a young woman navigating violent masculine terrain
The Revenant – Visceral survival, physical storytelling, minimal dialogue
No Country for Old Men – Moral ambiguity, landscape as character
Hell or High Water – Economic desperation, systems crushing individuals, elegy for a dying way of life
First Cow – Period intimacy, survival through craft, defiance against empire
Four months later. Western plains. Flat land. Horizon forever. No mountains.
Birdie walks down Main Street. Clean dress. Hair longer. Belly round and unmistakable—seven months now. She buys supplies. A shopkeeper asks when the baby's due. Soon, she says. Smiles. The first real smile we've seen.
She returns to a small room. A bed. A chair. A window.
No copper. No stills. No mountains.
For the first time: the weight is gone.