Produced by Tribe of Heart

Reviewed by Courtney Kelly, age 13


"The Witness" is the extremely moving movie, about how a simple cat-sitting job changed a man's entire outlook on life.

The movie starts out downtown in the Bronx, where a man named Eddie Lama works as a contractor. Eddie explains how going up in the Bronx "isn't a very pacifist environment." As a kid, his friends had little respect for the stray cats in the streets and would chase after and taunt the animals for fun. The house where he grew up wasn't exactly animal-friendly, either. His mother thought of animals as dirty and "unhygienic." It wasn't until he was in his late twenties that Eddie could even fathom the concept of owning an animal.

After cat sitting for a woman he knew, Eddie was asked to take in a stray by the same woman. This was also when he stopped smoking. After realizing that the cat, being confined in the same room as him with all the smoke, was breathing this in, too. And being ten times smaller than he it had to be, he figured ten times as bad for the cat.

As soon as he learned the truth about factory farms and the leather and fur industries, Eddie felt like he had to let the rest of the world know, too. In this video, Eddie loads up a van with a television, a video containing disturbing scenes from the trapping industry, and brochures about the fur industry. With the video playing from the side door of his van, Eddie slowly drove through the New York City streets, touching hundreds along the way.

Eddie now runs a large, Humane Society-like sanctuary in upstate New York called The Oasis Sanctuary. The sanctuary has volunteers that take in and care for stray, unwanted animals.