The Watershed is a 90-minute personal documentary looking back at a traumatic time in the life of an American family. In the course of one year, the Trunks went from being considered the ideal family to being poor and "broken" after the filmmaker's father filed for divorce. Mary was the oldest of seven young children attempting to take care of themselves and their alcoholic mother. Twenty-eight years later, everyone involved tells their own personal survival story.

The Watershed is about combining all of these stories in search of a shared truth. The film is about memory and the variations that exist within it. It is about survival and how members of a family deal with circumstances out of their control. It is about coming to terms with tragedy and betrayal. The Watershed paints a larger picture of all families attempting to understand their internal dynamics and relationships.

The film combines digital video interviews of family members discussing their story with Super-8 home movie footage of the various neighborhoods and situations the in which the family lived.