Two guys, one grill, half a leg and one huge lawsuit. It is usually fiction that makes the most astonishing stories. In this case however, it is the actual truth that leaves us agape.

Maiden, North Carolina, a rural small town an hour’s drive away from Charlotte, has 3000 inhabitants. Self-declared businessman Shannon A. Whisnant purchases a grill at a storage facility auction and what he finds upon opening the grill is a human foot.

The leg’s former owner, John Wood, lost his leg in a plane crash and decided to keep it afterwards as way to commemorate the loss of his father. The audience soon discovers the reason for this odd wish: since losing his leg, Wood struggled with alcohol and substance abuse and became more estranged from his family. How his leg ended up in the grill is a mystery. What’s more, Wood and Whisnant have actually known each other their whole lives, although both moved in different socioeconomic directions.

What comes next can only be described as a huge turmoil around a feud that has been even more exaggerated through the public eye by news networks. The story blows up, not least because of Shannon Whisnant’s lifelong dream to become famous on TV.

Whisnant begins to call himself “the foot-man” and the grill becomes some sort of a morbid tourist attraction. He explains by simply stating, “Yeah I’m crazy, but good crazy.” The viewer starts to think it cannot get any weirder when Whisnant asks Wood for shared custody of Wood’s leg. To settle this, both parties take matters to Judge Mathis, of the reality show “Judge Mathis.”

It took the directors Bryan Carberry and J. Clay Tweel more than seven years to finish the documentary due to trouble funding the project. After success on Kickstarter, they got back on track. The resulting film is both tragic and comic. What initially appears to be an absurd small town quarrel turns into a much deeper story about life’s trials and tribulations, which works especially through their empathetic portrayal of the characters. Both protagonists make us laugh and evoke our deepest sympathy at the same time when hearing what they have been going through.

In the end, it’s ambiguous who actually keeps the leg. It’s left to the audience to decide whether lost items belong to the famous finders or to the losers.

“Finders Keepers” is currently playing in select theaters.

Email Michelle Martin at [email protected].