Standing Ground (working title)

This production explores the impacts of industrialized farming on animals, people, and the environment. Further, it explores whether putting into practice a more informed ethic about the animals raised for food, thereby improving their welfare, could be a foundation for a more just and ecologically sound farming and food system.

The documentary tells thought-provoking and inspiring stories of farmers on both sides of the Atlantic, in both the southern and northern hemispheres, feeding people by raising animals in ecologically appropriate ways, from peasant farmers using traditional husbandry methods and meeting local food needs to commercial farmers creating sophisticated networks and marketing food from ecologically sound farms to farmers' markets, food coops, and both mainstream and high end retailers and restaurants.

In each setting, animals are filmed being themselves. In light of children's roles, both as inheritors of past and present generations' impacts on the earth and its inhabitants and as shapers of the future, children are shown working with and learning from animals on their farms and receiving prizes in a European Commission competition for drawings illustrating the freedoms we owe farm animals: freedom from hunger and thirst, discomfort, pain, injury and disease, fear and distress, and to express normal behaviors.

With ninety percent of filming already completed, in the remaining months of 2011 remaining key commentaries will be filmed and post-production and marketing will begin, with the goals of submitting to international film festivals in 2012 and a subsequent theater release.

All filming to date has been done by professional crews, with the majority being shot on Sony XDCAM HD, and is original to the film.