- Full length Documentaries
ARCTIC DOOMSDAY VAULT (working title)
70'/ 52’ documentary shot on HD
A SMIRSH IRELAND/ BERGEN FILM NORWAY CO-PRODUCTION
A “Noah’s Ark” like vault to store the world’s wealth of agricultural seed is being built for our descendants in the ice-depths near the North Pole. We follow its construction and spy on those locating the seed from around the world to store in this ice bound slumber. Who will control this larder in case of a global disaster?
SYNOPSIS
Within a large concrete room, hewn out of a sandstone mountain, lined with permafrost, on the island of Spitzbergen could lie the future of humanity. An “immovable ark” is being built to contain duplicates of seeds of every extant food plant in the world and all their ancestors stretching back to the very birth of farming.
 Whatever might befall the world and its food supply whether nuclear war, climate change, chemical terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes or tsunami or the collapse of electricity supplies; if the worst came to the worst, these seeds mid the ice would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on this planet. Even if some catastrophe meant that the vault was abandoned, the permafrost would keep the seeds viable, and even accelerated global warming would take many decades to penetrate the mountain vault.
We have been granted access to all stages of this Noah-like enterprise:
to the tendering process of the Vault construction. Which ‘Noah’ will build this fridge/ vault? The competing designs will be charted, discussions heard, drawings seen of double nuclear proof doors, rendered in ever cleverer computer graphics.
to the work on the massive Vault which begins with the return of the first Arctic sunlight in March 2007, when the first dynamite is laid.
to the seed gathering from around the world, monitored from the offices of the Global Crop Diversity Trust in Rome. A delicate operation politically, scientifically and strategically. How do they gain access to the world’s existing gene banks?
To the monitoring of the seeds arriving at the central gene-bank ‘depot’ in Alnarp, Sweden for sifting and eventual transportation to the Arctic.
Two thirds of the documentary will be situated in climates far different than 78 degrees North. We follow sample seed gatherings from several global locations, each a lesson in the history of food strains: the original wild wheat ( Turkey), samples of possible necessity of having backup duplicates due to war (Iraq and Rwanda ( Archive) )), suspicion of centralised control of agricultural gene-banks ( France ), controversial placing of genetically modified (GM) seeds in the new Arctic Vault ( France) , samples of well manned but badly financed gene-banks (Ecuador). The great sense of earth’s expanding population’s reliance on easily provided food (the Rice Gene Bank in The Philippines) In total seven different climate regions are visited – the different vagaries of crop histories are played out sumptuously in each location. Ultimately these visits are about decisions regarding what seeds are sent to the Arctic: the chosen few, the chosen many?
Visually there is a stark contrast between the fecund locations of growth and the snow swept destination of the seeds. Those now involved at the forefront of seed harvesting ranges from the bright professors to the smiling and not so smiling peasants of the world opine. The plants have no opinions but always hang and sway ominously round our head talkers. This is neither propaganda for the Vault nor an attack on its curious millenarian intentions, but a chance to log an extraordinary chapter of human history with wonder, horror and humour.
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