Private Project

Serf's Up: Home & Happiness in the New Feudalism

Alan Kryszak’s 2025’s documentary feature film “Serf’s Up”, provides a wide platform for several generations’ visions, dreams and realities: of what “home and happiness” means. A look at the Medieval World of Feudalism and life-long “rental society”, reflected in new generations’ tales of temporary jobs, no health insurance and an unlikely hope of ever owning their own home, in a landlord’s world of perpetual debt.

  • Alan Kryszak
    Director
    The Religion Move, Hungry Now, Privacy & the Power of Secrets, When the Chevy Breaks, Whatever Works: Exploring Opiate Addiction, Who Made You in America?
  • Alan Kryszak
    Producer
  • UMaine's Downeast Documentary Film Crew
    Key Cast
  • Alan Kryszak
    Cinematography
  • Ryan Maluski Malagara
    Additional Drone Photography
    DRONE's EYE VIEW Photography
  • Project Type:
    Documentary
  • Genres:
    Social Exploration, Generational Struggles, Veteran's, Veteran's Profile, College student Issues, Class Struggle, Musk, Wealth Discrepancy, 2025 Politics, DOGE, Budget Cuts
  • Runtime:
    1 hour
  • Completion Date:
    March 31, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    1,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States, United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Full HD Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Alan Kryszak

Al Kryszak is a Filmmaker/Composer with 40 years of concert, film and visual work, on KINO International, AppleMusic and The Orchard/Atlantic Screen Group.

His film premieres include documentaries on PBS, The Roxie in San Francisco, Boston, Maine Public Television, The Hague Global Cinemafest, Sweden Film Awards, Docs Without Borders, The Amsterdam World Canvas Festival, Toronto Short Film Festival, The Swiss Screenwriting & Cinematic Summit & the Cinema Carnival in Pisa.

Concert & film music has premiered on Turner Classic Movies, The Film Society of Lincoln Center, KINO International, Los Angeles Directors Guild, Symphony Space, The North American New Music Festival, New York Shakespeare Festival, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, Carnegie Recital Hall and SummerKeys Institute, among other venues.

Following 2022’s "Hungry Now", premiering in Maine, New Hampshire, Public Television & PBS Web, 2023’s “The Religion Move” features stories of the “following” or the “leaving” of several religious belief systems.

Kryszak teaches Media coursework at The University of Maine at Machias and Augusta, Unity College, and Southern New Hampshire University.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

2025’s doc feature “Serf’s Up”, presents greed, a bit of Musk, the working poor, and veterans' looking back at home and happiness, and the odds of achieving it.

It's not a political film, in the sense of one party or another, but it does look at the weaponized use of wealth and hopelessness, wielded by the comfortable on the working who are too busy and too poor to notice they may never own the room they sleep in.

We hear from the poorest county in rural Maine, to San Francisco, with the highest rents in the nation.