Carl Gierstorfer

Annual awarding of the Grimme Awards.

Over the course of one winter, this 4-part documentary series observes an intensive care unit at Berlin's Charité hospital, at the height of the pandemic to date. The films offer an intimate insight into a world on the threshold between life and death, unknown to most. Around the clock, the staff on Ward 43 fight to save the lives of those seriously ill with the novel Coronavirus. Up close and without commentary, "Inside Charité: Covid-ICU 43" tells the story of this struggle in a microcosm that knows neither day or night, populated by glaring lights and beeping machines. Despite high-tech intensive care and immense personal dedication, the staff repeatedly come up against the limits of their human abilities. They are confronted with a completely new disease that can damage the entire body and defies tried and tested therapies. Time and again, the experienced doctors and nurses have to accept the inevitable and let their patients go

Shrouded in secrecy and notoriously cash-strapped the North Korean regime has resorted to running one of the world's largest slaving operations - exploiting the profits to fulfil their own agenda. These bonded labourers can be found in Russia, China and dozens of other countries around the world including EU member states. Featuring undercover footage and powerful testimonials, we reveal the scale and brutality of the operation and ask what, if anything, is being done to stop it.

How is it possible that North Korea, one of the poorest countries on earth finances a nuclear weapons program large enough to challenge the USA? The answer: Bureau 39, a legendary organization nestled deep inside the government apparatus. Its aim is to procure foreign exchange by any means possible to provide Kim Jong-un’s regime with money.

In March 2022, the war between Ukraine and Russia is raging. While Russian troops are at the gates of Kyiv, this documentary films events in a paediatric hospital in Lviv treating the victims of the conflict. A powerful portrait of a doctor’s daily life in wartime.

This film tells the story of the unknown pre-history of the AIDS virus, long before people started to die in the US and Europe. Following a team of scientists we uncover a forgotten medical archive in the Democratic Republic of Congo, that tells of an epidemic a full two decades before anyone knew about the novel killer. From high-tech labs in the US to African medics who have their boots on the ground, we trace HIV back to its origin in the jungles of Cameroon. In the decades around the turn of the 20th century, colonialism fundamentally changed the lives of millions of people in central Africa; it created an environment that allowed HIV to leave its original host, the chimpanzee, and start to spread in humans.

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A century ago, the people of the Mashco Piro fled deep into the Peruvian Amazon to escape the cruelty of colonialist rubber companies. They cut all contact with the outside world, entering an isolation they still haven't abandoned. German filmmaker/biologist, Carl Gierstorfer, turns around in front of the forest, looking back at those who want to contact the isolated Mashco Piro: missionaries, gold miners, drug traffickers, ordinary villagers. Only a group of dedicated anthropologists stands between outside forces and the Mashco Piro, themselves torn between curiosity and fear. When a murder happens, Gierstorfer is there to document the story.

Wars can begin with a single shot. Peace is a task for generations. On a journey around the world, the film explores examples of how peace emerges and what it takes to preserve it in the long term, and to foster understanding, reconciliation, and coexistence.

Murmansk, a Russian port located near the Arctic Circle. Murmansk was a key military port of the entire Soviet nuclear submarine fleet. Today, only tons of dangerous radioactive material remain - like a ticking time bomb, threatening the North Sea environment, but also the whole globe. A team of German scientists has taken on a monumental task: to safely store 200 nuclear submarines and icebreakers so that they do not endanger our environment. The document captures step by step all the steps that experts have to take to fulfill this challenging task ...