Every three seconds someone in the world, usually a child, dies in extreme poverty from hunger or a preventable disease. A horrific statistic.

Wilton resident Jeanne Robertson wants to put an end to that. Working with filmmaker Daniel Karslake, a longtime friend from their student days at Duke University, Robertson is one of several producers working on a documentary titled Every Three Seconds (everythreeseconds.org) to raise awareness of the worldwide hunger crisis, and connect people to organizations created to end hunger. Work started on the film in 2008. Filming began this past spring.

Karslake is a writer, director, and cinematographer whose Emmy-nominated work has aired on PBS. His last film premiered at Sundance and won nine Best Documentary audience awards at prestigious film festivals around the country. “In a sermon at church a couple of years ago, I learned that 30,000 people a day die from hunger. I couldn’t get that out of my mind,” explains Karslake. He says his goal is to convey the “inconvenient truth” about world hunger—to do for it what Al Gore’s  movie did for global warming—and that ending hunger is within our reach.

The film tackles the subject in a new way, says Robertson. It explores the premise that people who have never experienced physical hunger or poverty may experience an emotional hunger or void. “Many of us who have everything we need—a beautiful home, healthy children—still feel unsatisfied, with a hole in our heart. We’re looking for that thing that doesn’t come from success or possessions,” she says. The documentary consists of five different stories of materially successful individuals who woke up to the fact that poverty and hunger are solvable. “Most people want to make a difference. The people featured in the film have moved from intending to make a difference to actually doing something significant to fight poverty,” she notes.

One of the people profiled in the film, Josh Nesbit, co-founder and executive director of Frontline SMS: Medic, launched an organization called Hope Phones. This group collects discarded cell phones to fund the purchase and distribution of usable ones to community health care workers in impoverished rural areas around the world. The cell phones provide villagers, who previously had to walk hundreds of miles for medical care, with a connection and access to medical information, doctors, emergency care, and transportation to distant medical centers. In doing so, this program saves countless lives.

Producing a documentary requires money, and fundraising is Robertson’s expertise. She was director of development at the American Council of the Arts, and more recently, major gifts manager at the Westport Country Playhouse. She spearheaded the first fundraising effort for Every Three Seconds in Connecticut in October. The event, held at the Wilton home of John DiRocco, was a huge success. More than 200 people attended, raising $80,000 toward the $1.2 million required to produce the documentary. Karslake spoke and showed excerpts of the film.

“You need to be passionate about a documentary because it’s hard work,” Karslake explains, and continues. “Losing thirty thousand people a day is a silent tsunami. One of the things I was most struck by when I was in Malawi was the fact that though these people have nothing, they are so centered. When you contrast that with our seemingly insatiable need for more, you really wake up. That’s what we want this film to do. Wake people up, and motivate them to go out and do something to end world hunger.”