Leap of Faith: Fast Lane to Farmstead

In the Fall of 2006 I was up in the Bay area with my partner Mike while he was working on a feature film; I was doing the research legwork for a feature documentary and having fun exploring this magical, beautiful area. On Mike’s days off we would be shooting for our own film, and while he was working I was free to go wherever the mood took me. Before leaving Los Angeles, my friend and neighbor had suggested I look up her friend Roberta Cootes, who lives in Healdsburg, roughly an hour’s drive north of San Francisco.

Roberta was kind enough to take me on a walking tour of this lovely Sonoma town. It was a bright, crisp and sunny Saturday - market day in Healdsburg. All the local farmers were out selling their wares. I met Eric and Pascal at their market booth. I sampled their fantastic handcrafted goat cheese and chatted to them for a few minutes, discovering to my surprise that they had only started making cheese the prior year. It was immediately apparent that they were special people; I knew I wanted to make a film about them. A few days later, very early in the morning, Mike and I were at Pugs Leap Farm, shooting for the first time.

So began a three-year journey to make what would become Leap of Faith: Fast Lane to Farmstead. Our original intention had been to make a short film, to tell a small pastoral story. As we got to know this couple, learned the motivation behind their life-changing decision to leave the corporate world entirely, felt their passion for their new lifestyle and saw their commitment to each other, we couldn’t help but be inspired.

We began to understand that the film had a life of its own, and the project became bigger than we had imagined. We were welcomed into the tight-knit local food community, shooting interviews with local farmers and cheese-mongers. The more we talked to Eric and Pascal and to other local food professionals, and the more we learned, it soon became clear that this film would have something to say about the individual and community benefits of local living and the importance of farm-fresh food.

I have always been passionate about good food, but making Leap made me realize how dangerously industrialized our food has become. The film’s rough cut addressed some of the scary things Eric and Pascal had to say about the current state of our food system. To make sure the viewpoint was balanced, we set about finding someone to validate or disprove the issues raised in the film, and were lucky enough to have Dr. David Heber, Director of the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition and one of the top clinical nutritionists in the world, agree to an interview.

Dr. Heber’s commentary opened our eyes even more. But Eric and Pascal’s personal story would remain the heart of our film.

This film questions the pace of modern life, and asks people to stop for a moment to consider whether big business and fast food have made our lives better. The example set by Eric and Pascal offers an alternative: Find a way to eat, to live, locally. We want people to think about what they are putting in their bodies and where it has come from. We want people to know that it’s possible to change a lifestyle that’s not working, but that it’s a choice that must be made every day. It’s not always easy, but the results are worth the effort. That’s the core message.

As we were finishing the film, I connected with Cathy Raymond of the non-profit Farm-to-Consumer Foundation. Our goal for the film aligned perfectly with their mission to educate people about sustainably farmed food, so we decided that we would use the film to support their work by donating a dollar to the Foundation for every DVD sold, and helping to raise awareness.

Like the small farmers championed by the Farm-to-Consumer Foundation, we are completely independent. Breaking the industry rule of using “Other People’s Money”, Leap was made entirely out of pocket, allowing us the freedom to make the film we wanted to make. Support came at the end of post-production in the form of donated archival video footage from stock photography and video house iStockphoto. Through film sales and continued support from donors, we will keep making documentaries, staying small and independent, building our own sustainable business.

-Alexandra Austin, Producer

It was my absolute pleasure to work on Leap of Faith. It should be every filmmaker’s good fortune to create a documentary as part of their body of work. It is an uncommon stroke of luck to find, or be given, a subject that challenges your creative ability, tests your experience, and teaches you something about yourself or your world.

This film marks many firsts for me; being a part of creating a story from beginning to end, seeing it through while shooting and directing, researching and editing, deconstructing, reconstructing, and finishing. I am particularly thankful to my producer and partner Alex, and to our editors: Ted Sullivan and Jon Stewart, for helping me manage the material and present it in an intelligent and respectful way.

When I first met Eric and Pascal, it was the Fall of 2006. I was immediately aware of their lack of pretense and a unique calmness of character. They have been through a lot. On the surface is a story about career choices and modern life in the big city, but, like layers of an onion, a deeper story emerges that fulfils a restlessness in the heart and inspires us to seek the best in ourselves and our lives. The best part, to me, is that this is a real story, not a concocted plot or a contrived message. All that was necessary was awareness and a desire to record the truth.

This film is about introspection and accountability. It contains themes that were not immediately recognizable, but became clearer as we spent more time with the couple. While sorting through issues of sustainable farming, GM food, pollution and public safety, Eric and Pascal graciously allowed us access to their lives and their most cherished beliefs. It is no small commitment to grant permission to crew and cameras to follow and record the day-to-day experience of life on the farmstead, and to reveal details of your private life, unselfishly, to an unknown audience. Yet they did, and in doing so, trusted us to work with integrity and honesty while telling their story.

It is my best hope that audiences will receive this film in those terms. Painstaking research was done in order to validate the opinions expressed in the documentary. Nothing was scripted or staged to make a point. In fact, the more we listened to our subjects and the deeper we went into the underlying issues, the more the story revealed itself. I found the themes to be transcendent to my own life experience. I am particularly attracted to discussions involving craftsmanship and working by hand; that made filming some the interviews very satisfying and educational.

The hardest part of making this film was in deciding what to leave out of the story, while maintaining its strength, and managing to avoid being preachy about some of the harder issues that concern us all.

I have to thank Eric and Pascal, Dr. Heber, John Raymond, Doralice Handal and all the people associated with Leap of Faith for making this one of the most cherished experiences of my life. My career has spanned many dozens of feature films and hundreds of television shows and commercials. As a technician you get to experience your own particular part of the process, but it is a rare gift to be able to produce the big picture and learn to understand a story from all angles.

I have already told many people that this documentary has taught me more about filmmaking and about myself than I have learned in more than twenty years on set in the movie industry. I look forward to the next one.

-Michael J. Walsh

Veterans of film and television, this is the first creative collaboration on a documentary film for Producer Alexandra Austin and Director Michael Walsh. Fittingly, their film revolves around the collaborative effort of another pair; Eric Smith and Pascal Destandau, formerly of San Francisco. Through intimate interviews on their farm in Healdsburg, this film explores the motivations and reasoning behind Eric and Pascal's decision to leave behind their urban lives as successful businessmen, to become goat farmers in the rural town of Healdsburg. Trading in long commutes, consumerism, and the urban rat race for a 3 1/2 acre farm, named Pugs Leap, and 35 goats, became a journey of self-discovery and social conscience for the couple. With the help of their goats, all with names and personalities of their own, Eric and Pascal produce their own artisan goat cheese, which they sell at local markets. Living on locally harvested foods, and the profits from their purposefully designed “no-growth business”, their partnership and lifestyle are a model not only for sustainable local living, but making a life choice and acting on it everyday. Woven into the fabric of their story is a running commentary on food production and distribution, featuring supporting commentary by Dr. David Heber, Director of the UCLA Center for Nutrition, and local cheese guru John Raymond. This is an inspiring true story that will make us all think a little deeper about our next trip to the grocery store or farmers market.