TALK TIME:CARTER GUNN AND ROSS McDONNELL directors of 'Colony', an Irish documentary about honeybees, writes EOIN BUTLER
When people hear you’ve made a documentary about bees, how long does it take to convince them that this is a subject they might be interested in?
RMcD: About three minutes. Once people understand how intrinsic bees are to the food chain and the ecosystem in general, and once they appreciate the magnitude of the collapse in the bee population, they’ll generally sit up and take notice. Also, there’s a wave of food consciousness and interest in sustainability, and I think this film really taps into that.
The scale of the collapse is shocking. In the US, the bee population has fallen by 90 per cent in the past 50 years
CG: Well, over that time period, everything from mites and diseases to human population growth, which has decimated the scrubland where bees used to graze, have impacted. All of those factors have contributed to the collapse of bee populations.
RMcD: The current crisis dates back to 2004, when a Pennsylvania beekeeper named David Hackenberg – who has since become basically the poster boy for what’s called Colony Collapse Disorder – opened up his beehives and found nothing there. Eighty percent of his bees had vanished. They don’t know whether it’s a disease or a virus or what.
No one knows what’s causing this collapse. But there are several theories
RMcD: Well, the wackiest is that cell-phone signals are killing the bees. People are saying that the volume of electronic data in the skies, as a result of electronic messaging, was causing the bees to no longer know how to find their way home. This theory was roundly dismissed by any experts we spoke to.
CG: A lot of the theories coming from the beekeeping industry and the research community pointed to either pesticides or a new virus which, due to bad health and poor nutrition, bees weren’t able to fight off.
And what are the knock-on effects of this change? I’ve read that as much as a third of all fruits and vegetables are pollinated by the honeybee
RMcD: That’s right, so it’s having a huge effect on the food chain. What piqued our interest in the story in the first place were these statistics we kept reading that, for example, honeybees pollinate every third bite of food we eat. They pollinate alfalfa, for example, which is a type of grass that feeds the US beef industry. We wouldn’t be able to feed ourselves, basically, if there was no more honeybee pollination.
The central characters in your film are the Seppi family
RMcD: They’re a family of beekeepers from the town of Pixley, California. They have seven children – all home-schooled, fundamentalist Christians. They’re not Amish, but they’re very insular and traditional in outlook. They read a lot of End Times prophecies.
The first thing that will strike most people about the film is how incredible it looks
RMcD: Middle America just has something timeless and innately cinematic about it. We were shooting these beautiful insects floating around in orchards, with crisp Californian light a lot of the time, or on mountainsides in Montana. And I think you’re right, there’s something poetic about those Kerouac badlands that everyone can relate to somehow. Even the town where the Seppis are from, in California, is mentioned in The Grapes of Wrath as a place the “Okies” migrated to during the Great Depression, which suggests all these evocative images of the last frontier.
The beekeepers even call themselves the last cowboys, because they migrate with their animals
RMcD: Yes, they put their beehives on the back of a truck and they’re basically on the road all year. They’ll go from orange groves in Florida, to cranberries in Massachusetts, blueberries in Maine, almonds in Washington, apples in California. It’s basically a giant loop.
Given the American subject matter, had you any trouble getting funding from the Irish Film Board?
RMcD: When Carter and I wrote up the pitches for this film we took them to Morgan Bushe and Macdara Kelleher at Fastnet Films. They thought it was a great story, and encouraged us to take it to the Irish Film Board through them. The film board saw potential in it, too. I think they were more interested in the fact that we were Irish film-makers (well, Carter is American) working on a big international story than whether it was specifically Irish or not.
‘Variety’ loved the film, saying: “The mischievous genius of ‘Colony’ lies in the fact that bees don’t serve as a metaphor for people, as much as people serve as a metaphor for bees”
RMcD: Well, yes, there are striking similarities between this human colony and the bee colony. Both colonies are in danger. We thought we could humanise the bees through this family, and that’s kind of the metaphor that runs through the film.
www.colonymovie.com
