Franz Hafner

Records the battle for the survival of the big cats and reveals intimate details of their lives. The animals they prey on are also in the film: tigers couldn’t survive without sika deer, Altai wapiti, wild boars and Asian black bears. Guiding the viewer through the film, an elder tiger tells the story of his cub, born in a conservation area, the year after he leaves his mother.

After beginning in Vienna, the Danube riverbank forests extend to the gates of Bratislava, linking the two capitals like a green ribbon, forming a unique wildlife habitat in the heart of Europe. A few years ago a 36 kilometer section was turned into a national park that now protects the last undeveloped stretch of the Danube River and also the last riparian zone of its size in Central Europe.

In the Anthropocene, Homo sapiens has become Homo mobilis: highways, railways, air and sea connections. But wild animals also want to be mobile. They always have been, even though neither road maps nor navigation systems show us their migration routes on land, water, and in the air. Their migrations safeguard Europe's biodiversity.

This three-part series is an epic journey of discovery of the natural world along the Amur and its tributaries and of the rich wildlife and the native people inhabiting the Earth’s greatest remaining wilderness area – a surprising and exotic world shaped and perpetually reshaped by extreme forces of the atmosphere and one of the Earth’s most active tectonic zones. The three episodes portray the unique characters of the Amur’s lower, middle and upper reaches – separate worlds that could not be more different and diverse.