Serengeti

The subject of the documentary is the great migration that repeats every year in the Serengeti. Wildebeest travel hundreds of kilometres in search of grass worth eating. At the end of the rainy season they move north as one enormous herd of more than a million animals. Zebras and gazelles join the migration too, and lions and cheetahs follow the herd along the way. The hardest point is the crossing of the Mara; the animals meet banks metres high and crocodiles alike. When the rains begin the herd turns south again, and the film puts the reason down to a shortage of phosphorus in the grass to the north. The account shows nature not as a spectacle but as a chain of necessities. Reinhard Radke’s hundred minute German documentary was completed in 2011.