GREEN BAY, Wis. — The pandemic forced last year's Green Bay premiere of "Rescue Story: Saving Companion Animals" to go makeshift drive-in style in a church parking lot, but it didn't keep Milo from walking the red carpet.
With a stretch limousine as a backdrop, the dog with a face cameras love — one brown eye and one blue — posed for photos at the by-invitation showing in October. He had come a long way, both literally and figuratively, from being surrendered as a puppy in Texas to finding a home in Green Bay. Somewhere in between, he became a film star.
His is one of many stories told in the full-length documentary about the challenges and triumphs of companion animal welfare as seen through municipal shelters, pet stores, nonprofit organizations, animal sanctuaries and prisons. Among the rescue groups prominently featured is Happily Ever After Animal Sanctuary, a no-kill shelter with the main sanctuary in Marion and its Green Bay Adoption Center in Ashwaubenon.
"Rescue Story" will have its first local public screening July 22 at the Ashwaubenon Performing Arts Center, the Green Bay Press-Gazette reported.
The project from Conscious Content Collective and Appleton-based Shaman Motion Pictures was filmed at both of HEA's locations as well as other organizations across the country. HEA founder and president Amanda Reitz and her brother, Marcus Reitz, director of the nonprofit's branding and marketing, also traveled to Corpus Christi, Texas, in 2019 for filming that included Peewee's Pet Adoption World & Sanctuary, Nueces County Animal Control and Corpus Christi Animal Care Services.
HEA has a partnership with Peewee's, often bringing animals to Green Bay for adoption to help ease overcrowding in shelters in Texas. It's there that HEA and the film crews first met Milo, or Holler as he was named when he arrived at Peewee's as an owner surrender. Little was known about his backstory, but he was likely surrendered because of an "owned" pet that wasn't spayed and then had puppies, Marcus Reitz said.
Holler was transported to Wisconsin and adopted through HEA, where he now lives as Milo with a family in the Green Bay area. He'll make a special appearance at the Ashwaubenon screening.
One of the themes of "Rescue Story" is to show the connectedness of animal welfare when it comes to reducing the number of shelter animals that are euthanized each year, an estimated 1.5 million, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Dogs that are given second chances are shown enriching the lives of veterans and first responders with PTSD as trained service dogs with 4 Paws 2 Freedom, or helping children to improve their reading confidence at libraries through a program called HALO Angel Ears.
The 65-minute film shines a light on the tireless efforts that go on daily to get to those happy endings but also reminds audiences that pet overpopulation is not without sadness.
"As pet parents and pet adopters and people who love animals in our community, generally what we experience is the outcomes and all the happy and easy parts and the stuff that just seems to happen so seamlessly, but behind the scenes there's so much work that goes into making this happen," Marcus Reitz said. "The filmmakers did an incredible job of making the problem understood, but in a way that really demonstrates the forward progress of this movement and the hope that really rests on the future."
Since its release last year, "Rescue Story" has received a multitude of accolades at virtual film festivals in the United States and abroad in India, Spain, the Netherlands and elsewhere. It has earned seven wins and nine official selections, said Kimberly Resch, a co-founder of Conscious Content with Brian Ross.
The hope is that the film gets people to see the bigger picture of animal overpopulation and inspires them to help in their own communities.
"It's a much bigger picture than just the animals we're talking about," Amanda Reitz says in the film. "How we treat the animals in our community is how we end up treating each other. If we don't care about those animals then we also don't care about each other and the people that are surrounding us on a daily basis. It's time that we all take a look at how we invest in those animals in our community, because that will show us how we're going to invest in each other."
A camera crew films Amanda Reitz, founder of Happily Ever After Animal Sanctuary, in 2019 in Corpus Christi, Texas, for the documentary "Rescue Story: Saving Companion Animals." The film will screen July 22 at the Ashwaubenon Performing Arts Center.
HEA will use the screening at 7 p.m. July 22 as the kickoff of its third annual Hour of Love fundraiser, in which individuals, families, businesses or other groups sign up to spend an hour cuddling cats and dogs at HEA and share their experiences via photos, social media posts, texts and phone calls to pet lovers they know to encourage donations.
Donations made during Hour of Love, beginning with the "Rescue Story" screening and ending at midnight July 24, will be matched $2 to $1. HEA hopes to secure $100,000 in matching funds (it's currently at $70,000) by the time the event begins to reach its goal of raising $150,000 in honor of its 15th year, Marcus Reitz said.
The screening of "Rescue Story" is free, but registration is requested at houroflove.org. People will be able to register on-site if seats are still available the evening of the screening.
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