With Quest for the Lost Tribes, Simcha Jacobovici goes where Indiana Jones fears to tread in the name of solving one of ‘the three great mysteries of western civilization,’ he says. The first is the Ark of the Covenant, the second is the Holy Grail, both familiar to most people through Harrison Ford films. The last of the great mysteries is the fate of the 10 lost tribes of Israel – who were mentioned extensively in the Bible up until 2,700 years ago and then appear to have vanished from history – and it is this that Jacobovici sets out to establish.

His search has more than curiosity value – with millennial madness in the air it is interesting to note that most of the prophesies concerning the lost tribes say that their return to Israel will herald the Apocalypse. And according to Jacobovici, they’re on their way back.

Like ‘an historical Sherlock Holmes,’ Jacobovici – who wrote, narrated, directed and coproduced (with Elliott Halpern) the film – and a team of researchers spent two years doing nothing else but tracking down information – archeological evidence, historical mentions, anything that could lead them to the lost tribes.

‘We took the Bible and used it as a treasure map. The Bible says where they went. We just looked at modern maps to see if we could find those names,’ he says.

An example of the process concerns finding, Jacobovici says, the tribe of Gad, which according to the Bible went to Havor by the River Gozan – or, Jacobovici thinks, the anglicized Khyber Pass by the River Gazni. ‘After 2,700 years, a little mispronunciation is totally unsurprising.’

From there it was simply a matter of ‘getting off the plane, running up to the Khyber Pass and saying, ‘Excuse me Mr. Pathan tribesman, you with the Kalishnikov and the biblical robes, what’s your ancestry?’ And they said, ‘We are bani Israel [children of Israel].’ They still live in tribal groups and the tribal groups correspond to the tribes in the Bible.’

The search took the filmmakers to China, India, Tunisia, Israel, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. With such a travel-heavy and expensive shoot, the film’s funding from a&e, cbc, Alliance, the Rogers Documentary Fund, former ctcpf and tax credit certainly came in handy.

The Alliance Atlantis-distributed film had its origins in one of Jacobovici’s early documentaries concerning 60,000 Ethiopian Jews claiming to belong to the lost tribe of Dan returning to Israel.

‘At the time, there were no other contenders. And then I heard about another group [returning to Israel]. I thought, ‘Could this be like Close Encounters of the Third Kind [where characters are compelled to go to a certain place at a certain time without knowing why]? Is it possible to film a prophecy unfolding?’ As a filmmaker you aim your camera at stuff – how many times can you say you’ve aimed your camera at prophecy?’