“I’m so pleased with all five of them, I think they’re going to be terrific,” MacLachlan said.

MacLachlan said he was inspired to write the script after seeing a photograph in the New York Times of three elderly Polish farmers walking across a field. “The idea of these three older men was evocative to me of something, and it started the story of land and siblings and returning,” he said.

Kate Churchill, one of the producers of “Spotlight” — an Oscar nominee for best picture — is a co-producer of “Abundant Acreage Available.”

“What really was the main interest to me about it,” she said, “was the script and the texture of the writing. It just felt different from anything I’d read. And it is a beautiful story that deals with themes that apply to all of us, of mortality and ownership and in the end what it all adds up to.”

The movie revolves entirely around those five characters, with no extras, and is set entirely on the tobacco farm. An old farmhouse in East Bend fills that role. MacLachlan said he found the farmhouse after driving around the area looking for a suitable location; since the story he had written was set in East Bend, he wanted to film it there as well.