Amber’s Halfway Home documentary aiming to help rescues

The upcoming documentary Amber’s Halfway Home is aiming to help rescues in need throughout western Tennessee as a woman does her best to save as many dogs in need as she can.

This is a short film that follows a day in the life of a dog rescuer named Amber Reynolds, also interviewing animal control officers, kennel workers, shelter volunteers and the people who dump their former pets out on the road in crafting a picture of what many animal shelters in rural areas throughout the South face on a daily basis.

The Amber’s Halfway Home documentary project is an outgrowth of Who Will Let the Dogs Out, which is an organization that came out of Cara Sue Achterberg’s travels that led to the book One Hundred Dogs and Counting.

Also working on the project are Farnival Films, a small media content group that cares about dog rescue and has experience in broadcasting and editing content for networks like ABC, CBS, ESPN, Fox and NBC.

Amber’s Halfway Home documentary needs your help to raise awareness about the plight of rural animal shelters.

While there are a variety of reasons dogs may be dumped into the shelter system (owners may be too poor or ill to take care of them, for example), another reason may be to due lack of spaying and neutering keeping the population manageable.

Many people do not intend to continue this cycle, but simply aren’t aware that shelter workers and volunteers face such an uphill battle in managing things on a day-to-day basis, in some cases basically devoting their lives to the cause, as Achterberg’s book notes. This film will hopefully open the audience’s eyes to what they can do to in their local community to make things easier.

Also in this educational vein about the realities of dog rescue is the upcoming video game To the Rescue (PC and Mac on Steam, Nintendo Switch), where players are a shelter director trying to use their limited resources in the most effective manner. This will release later this year.

The Amber’s Halfway Home documentary has a Kickstarter campaign running until noon on Wednesday, March 31, with a goal of $20,000. If you can donate, that would be amazing, as Kickstarter-backed projects either get their entire goal amount or none of it if that threshold is not met.

A $5 donation will earn a Facebook shoutout thank-you post, a $25 donation will earn an Amber’s Halfway Home sticker (shippable to US residents only), a $75 donation gives you the right to name a pound puppy, whose picture you will receive in the mail. A donation of $100 will receive a T-shirt (US only), a $250 donation will get a box of Farnival Films goodies or a Who Will Let the Dogs Out box of prizes (including signed copies of Cara Sue Achterberg’s books Another Good Dog and100 Dogs and Counting). Both of those reward levels are for US-only shipping as well.

If you can donate $500, you will receive a watercolor portrait of your pet (US only), and if you can donate $1,000, your name will be included in the completed film’s credits. If you can donate $2,500, you will get a free two-night stay at Chateau Frankie, a dog-friendly cabin near the Shenandoah National Park in Bentonville, Virginia.

The finished version of Amber’s Halfway Home will be entered into film festivals throughout the country, and will also premier in both Nashville, Tennessee and York, Pennsylvania (near Philadelphia area).

For more information about how you can help, or to learn about the documentary’s progress, see the Facebook pages of Farnival Films and Achterberg’s author page for the latest updates.