Making The Film

The Production Story

Over two years ago, Sally Ingleton heard a radio interview about Dr Ken Street, an Australian scientist on a mission to seek out ancient seeds. This fired up the documentary director’s imagination with images of exotic landscapes and adventurous travels. And it marked the start of a long journey that involved funding from five different countries and trips to far-flung destinations from the remote mountains of Tajikistan to the bustle of New York and to the icy Arctic.

Sally has always harboured a passion for telling universal stories that explore environmental issues and the human impact on the natural world. After tracking down Dr Ken Street in Syria and learning about his international band of ‘Seed Hunters’, Sally knew that this was the perfect subject to explore the ever increasing concern about the affects of climate change on food production.

Sally had embarked on the Seed Hunter documentary before the release of Al Gore’s celebrated film An Inconvenient Truth and there was general reluctance on the part of the television broadcasters to commission anything mentioning the E-word. As Sally recounts ‘It was a hard sell initially, there was little broadcaster interest in anything to do with the environment.’ Sally persisted and held her belief in the positive angle to this story: far from being all gloom and doom, Dr Ken and his team were using science to find practical and, more importantly, life saving solutions to some of the biggest problems facing the world today. Sally’s intuition proved to be right on the money as soon, public sentiment had swung right round and there was a huge hunger for anything that looked at climate change issues.

As the affects of extreme weather events, rising food costs, and a continuing severe drought took effect, suddenly everyone was talking about climate change and its impact on our food sources. Moreover Seed Hunter offered hope in the form of the charismatic Dr Ken who was working out in the field and bringing the results back to the lab.

One of the great challenges for Sally and her experienced editor Tony Stevens was finding the right balance between the adventures of the team of scientists out in the wilds of Tajikistan with the scientific work back in the lab. For Sally it was crucial that she took the audience on an entertaining ride, so the approach was to prioritise the drama and action. Using science elements to back up the narrative.

The result is an engaging science adventure story that has been nominated for Best Science, Environment and Technology Documentary 2008, Australian Teachers of Media Awards.