Behind the Scenes of "Bridge of Tomorrow"
About 12 000 years ago, one could have seen how people tracked wild sheep and goats through these same landscapes of the Fertile Crescent for their meat and wool. One could have watched as young animals were caught to be kept in what can be considered the first farms. Humans living in the valley wandered through the area seeking and gathering wild berries and cereal seeds.
“The crew was a group of about twenty people, who all woke up at 3am to be at the site as early as the day breaks and start recording the first scenes.”
There are plenty of diverse landscapes in Europe and the Middle East; why were Ehden and the Qadisha valley in the Fertile Crescent chosen for the video?
Magda Bou Dagher: The Qadisha Valley in Lebanon is one of many places on earth where the domestication of animals and plants has taken place. The Fertile Crescent, to which Lebanon belongs, is a centre of early domestication. Places like this, with huge diversity, were not only the centres of cultivation of plants but also where agriculture was invented. These places are characterised by the heterogeneity of the environment, with great landscape diversity, a high number of wild relatives of cultivated plants (crop wild relatives) and the presence of interspecific hybrids. It is exactly this landscape diversity of the Qadisha valley, that motivated our choice to make a film for the GenRes Bridge project that illustrates the importance of landscape conservation of such hotspots of genetic resources, including forest genetic resources, crop wild relatives and local animal breeds.
Which species can be found in the valley?
Magda Bou Dagher: In this zone one can find in only a handful of hectares more than 50 tree species, for example cedar, fir, pine, and wild species of pear and apple. There is also a high number of crop wild relatives and cultivated plants including wheat, orange, oat, and lentils. Facing difficult environmental conditions, Awassi, a local sheep breed that is well adapted to steep terrain is found in the landscape, and two local goat breeds, called Chami and Baladi.
Who helped you to organise the recording of the film? Were there any challenges the team had to tackle?
Magda Bou Dagher : Our partners at the University of Saint Joseph in Beirut selected the locations for the video and prepared the ground. When choosing the place, we did not imagine that the distance from the end of the road to this selected place could be a huge difficulty for the camera crew. To get there, it took us almost one and a half hours off-road in four-wheel drive vehicles that carried all the filming equipment. The crew was a group of about twenty people, who all woke up at 3am to be at the site as early as the day breaks and start recording the first scenes.
The weather was changeable. Fog was rising and covered the whole landscape from time to time. We had to add a sentence to the script to explain some of the scenes where the environment looked too misty.
But the most difficult part was the interaction between our actor, who played the shepherd, and the crowd of 400 goats and sheep accompanied by their real shepherd. In contrast to our expectations, this flock moves very fast. As soon as they arrived, they disappeared. In fact, when the goats and sheep are not at their pasture, they are in a hurry to find either pasture or shelter.
Because we had missed the sheep in the morning, we had to wait until they came back to their shelter in the evening. And even then, the change-over was chaotic. The animals were nervous and unpredictable when confronted with cameras, camera operators and assistants.
Did you gain any surprising insights during the work on the film ?
Magda Bou Dagher : In comparison to the local sheep, the alpine goats were much easier to approach because they are hardly able to run through the Lebanese mountains without getting injured. These non-local alpine goats belong to a pilot project that the shepherd is trying, to replace the local breed with one of higher productivity, even though it will be necessary to purchase fodder to maintain the introduced breed. In other words, we found ourselves in the middle of the kind of situation that GenRes Bridge addresses: the abandonment of locally adapted breeds that are the fruit of centuries of selection and their replacement with more productive breeds. What is happening on a small scale in Lebanon is occurring at larger scale across Europe.
Thank you very much for these valuable and exciting insights behind the scenes!
Magda Bou Dagher: You are welcome!
There are two versions of the film. One is 15 minutes long:
and a 5 minutes long version
