"I was gripped by stories of missing fishermen, and I had seen state police out on their boats," said Mary Healey Jamiel of Warren, about the evolution of her latest film, "Searchdog. "I started researching K9 search and rescue and the dogs of 9/11; I was trying to understand the science of scents and the biology of dogs, because I thought wanted to tell a science story.

"Then I read an article that led me to Matt Zarrella."

Matthew Zarrella was a Rhode State Police Sergeant (now retired) who rehabilitates “unadoptable” shelter dogs and transforms them into Search & Rescue/ RecoveryDogs. It was Zarrella's passion and dedication that created the K9 search and rescue program in Rhode Island, a job he undertook while working full-time as a trooper.

His ability to connect with these dogs, to see the potential in them, and to tap that potential, is uncanny. Zarrella's story quickly changed the structure and feel of Jamiel's film.

"I didn't know whether I had a film until I did a series of audio interviews with Matt, trying to understand his backstory," she said.

Not only did Healey Jamiel have a story, Zarrella's work became the story.
"It became the story of what it took for a human to partner with this animal, and to do something that separate from each other, they couldn't do," she said.

And what they did was locate missing people, with an uncanny success rate.
With a combination of interviews and archival footage — including a trip that Matt and one of his dogs Maximus took to Vietnam to locate the remains of missing servicemen in the early 1990's — Healey Jamiel followed Zarrella over four years of real time as he conducted searches and trained his students and their new canine partners to find missing persons.

With unprecedented access to document the Rhode Island State Police, Maine State Police and Maine Warden Service K9 Search & Rescue Units on search operations in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maine and New York, Healey Jamiel obtained rare, behind the scenes footage. The result is an 88-minute documentary that immerses viewers in the grueling task of finding missing persons with K9s when all other resources have failed.

And it can be unflinching indeed. In one scene in particular, the body of a drowned teenager is recovered. The footage is sensitively edited, but there is no mistaking that a human body has been recovered. For Healey Jamiel, it was her first experience witnessing something that, for Zarrella and other state troopers, is all in a day's work. Making the experience even more heart-wrenching was the fact that the young person's parents were present for the recovery.

It's not a place Healy Jamiel would have imagined finding herself, several years ago, as an undergraduate philosophy and political science major at Rhode Island College with an eye on law school. She did spend a couple years working in a law firm, but soon became clear that line of work wasn't for her.

"I was far too sensitive and emotional" to work in law, she said. "But that's great for being a filmmaker, I think, because you have to be empathetic and think about things in an emotional way."

"I really found my passion when I started taking documentary film classes at Emerson," Healey Jamiel said. "I started my own company (Lucy Bean Films) while I was in grad school, making short films." A stint as an Associate Producer at Olive Jar, the Boston animation studio responsible for some of the featured animations in the early days of MTV developed her skill and appreciation of animation, a technique used to great effect in Searchdog, thanks to the talents of animator (and fellow Rhode Islander) Dan Sousa. When she's not making films, Healy Jamiel teaches film and communication studies at URI.

Searchdog is not Healy Jamiel's first critically-acclaimed film: her documentary "Holy Water-Gate," released in 2004, was "the first film to lay bare 25 years of institutionalized cover-up of child sexual abuse by priests and details the methods and mechanisms that concealed these crimes for decades."

Searchdog has been on the film festival circuit for the past two years, selling out theaters and winning awards. It won "Best of the Fest" at its very first festival, the Palm Springs International. "It was amazing," she said. "When you first show your movie, you have no idea how the audience is going to react. And when Matt got up on stage he got a standing ovation."

Though the film is complete, these days Healey Jamiel is spending a lot of time promoting and distributing the film, a labor of love for a project that remains very close to her heart. "I was transformed by the people that I met (making Searchdog)," she said. "Seeing the work they did with these animals was inspiring."

Though retired from the Rhode Island State Police, Matt Zarrella continues to train police officers and dogs all around the country. You can read more about him, and his company American Patriot K9 Training, at www.ampkt.com.

Ruby, one of the dogs featured in the film, has been making her own news of late. She located a teenager who was injured and had been missing in the woods for 36 hours. In an unbelievable coincidence, the missing teenager was the son of a shelter worker who had fostered Ruby years earlier, before she had been adopted by the RI State Police. Ruby is up for a National Humane K9 Hero dog award for this rescue.

You can view the Searchdog trailer at www.searchdogmovie.com/videos. To watch the full film, you can find it on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, and GooglePlay, with extra scenes available through iTunes.