Isaiah with one of his pictures in a scene from Four Feet Up, screening Tuesday across the country to mark 20 years since Canadian MPs pledged to end child poverty. (Nance Ackerman/National Film Board)

Halifax filmmaker Nance Ackerman is screening her most recent documentary, Four Feet Up, across Canada on Tuesday to mark the 20th anniversary of Canada's promise to end child poverty.

The National Film Board production follows a little boy from over a two-year period as his family struggles to make ends meet.

Isaiah is an imaginative eight-year-old who loves to draw and play in the creek near his home Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley, but his family relies on the food bank to feed him and his four siblings. Both mother and father have overcome troubles and are concentrating on raising the children to do well in school, but it's a real struggle.

"I was really affected by how people judge the parenting of children of families considered to be poor," Ackerman said of her experience in shooting the film .

"I think people have become disengaged from the issue of poverty or [are] becoming frustrated with it," she told CBC News. "As a documentary filmmaker and a photographer, my goal is to connect people to the issue."

Ackerman has extended the study of poverty among children, which she began with Four Feet Up, with an online photo project featuring 20 children, aged one year to 20. It's a portrait of poverty across Canada, in settings as diverse as urban apartments, rural trailers and native reserves.

"We sort of followed the stereotype in order to destroy the stereotype because these kids are all beautiful and loved and clean, but their families are struggling," Ackerman said.

Ackerman calls her work The Anniversary Project and plans to build on it with videos by the older children in a later version of the website scheduled to be launched next year.

"Depending on their age, there is obviously a consciousness of poverty — except among the ones who can't talk. By the time they are six or seven they are aware of it," she said.

Music video planned

She also plans a music video and an interactive component to draw people into the debate about why Canada has so many children living in poverty, 20 years after MPs made a formal commitment in the House of Commons to conquer it.

Ackerman and her husband Jamie Alcorn are working with Boys and Girls Clubs, social service agencies and some MPs to get the word out about their free screenings and The Anniversary Project.

"I'm a mom. I think that any parent that sees this film is moved by it," Ackerman said, adding that she thinks things are getting more difficult for poor families.

Because the film concentrates on a family in Wolfville, N.S., where Ackerman herself will be for Tuesday's screening, she worried it ghettoizes Maritimers as poverty-stricken.

The Anniversary Project, which focuses a still camera on children across the country, attempts to show how universal the problem is, she said.

Screenings of Four Feet Up are scheduled in Wolfville, Mahone Bay and Halifax, N.S., Toronto, Montreal, Fredericton, Winnipeg and Victoria.