Lex Gillespie is a three time Peabody Award-winning public radio journalist-turned-filmmaker. "The Catskills" is his second film. His first, "The Mamboniks" (2019, 90 mins), explored the mambo craze of the 1950s. His features for public radio exposed dangerous jobs in garment factories on the US-Mexico border, chronicled the return of the sacred Blue Lake to the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, and told the story of a hip hop opera set in a Korean mom-and-pop corner store.