Dennis Gastmann - Orient Express - An Adventure

Dennis Gastmann travels in the footsteps of the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul: five thousand kilometres, seventeen cities, and countless detours into the unexpected. He finds himself in the flashbulbs of Paris Fashion Week, stays with a nonna who cooks for him like her own son, and learns from a gondoliera how to read a city built on water. He strokes the lions of an oligarch from the Little Carpathians - and nearly ends up as tiger food. He bathes in fire, fog and laser light in the world's largest noodle soup, as the Hungarians joke, and in a Bulgarian slum, on top of a mountain of rubbish, he meets a flower girl.

Sometimes on an express train, sometimes on a slow local, sometimes by bus through villages when the tracks run out - from the Gare de l'Est to Venice, Trieste to Budapest, Belgrade to Sofia, until the doors of the Orient open before him. The result is a portrait of a continent in upheaval: raw, intense, brimming with life. And everywhere Gastmann senses the shifts of the age - where does Europe stand, and what has become of the European dream?

Dennis Gastmann, born in 1978 in Osnabrück, has travelled every continent - as a writer, filmmaker and "guerrilla correspondent" for ARD's foreign affairs programmes. He circled the globe with 80,000 questions, walked across the Alps on foot (Gang nach Canossa), and visited the last unknown corners of the earth for his Atlas of Undiscovered Countries. For Der vorletzte Samurai he explored Japan. His reportages have won multiple awards and received three Grimme Prize nominations. Gastmann lives in Hamburg and works around the world.