Long Year Begin
The idea of some gigantic vault, built deep inside a mountain in the Arctic Circle to safely store seeds from all over the world in case of cataclysmic events, was a natural lure for our filmmaking team. Our cinematographer and I spent two months on the island of Svalbard at 79 degrees latitude (where polar bears outnumber people) looking for stories. We filmed inside the Svalbard Seed Vault and all around the island, where we discovered abandoned Russian coalmines, the world’s largest satellite array and the northernmost permanently populated town on Earth, called Longyearbyen.
For us, the island (and the vault itself) seemed to represent the trajectory of human civilization in its rawest form — the natural world overtaken by man, and then exactly the opposite: the work of science and agriculture to preserve our natural world, during a time in which we humans are frequently losing control of both our natural world and ourselves. Our film, Long Year Begin, became a story about preservation itself — what does it mean for humans to try to save our world? Why have we only just recently started to try, and what ends do we have in mind?
With the support of the Mountainfilm Commitment Grant, we’re thrilled to begin creating an online transmedia project to accompany our feature film, which will allow people to take virtual tours inside the seed vault. Each crate of seeds will represent a different country, where disparate stories of preservation that we’ve documented become interactive experiences for people to explore. Through allowing participants to inhabit an entire world of preservation stories, we're excited for people to meditate on the mechanics behind mankind’s desire to forge a future that can endure.
We asked the 2013 Mountainfilm Commitment Grant winners to report upon their projects. This blog marks the fifth in the series. Read the rest in the series: The Rider and The Wolf, Mending the Line, Rise and Who Owns Water.
