Dennis Gastmann - Orient Express - An Adventure

Following in the footsteps of Agatha Christie and Detective Poirot, Dennis Gastmann embarks on a grand journey: traveling along the route of the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul - five thousand kilometers, seventeen cities, and countless detours into adventure. A portrait of a continent in flux, in motion - wild, intense, and brimming with life. Gastmann finds himself in the spotlight of Paris Fashion Week, stays with a Nonna who cooks for him like her own son, and learns from a gondolier how to understand a city on water. He strokes the lions of an oligarch from the Low Tatras - and nearly becomes tiger food. He bathes in fire, fog, and laser light in what the Hungarians jokingly call the world's largest noodle soup, and encounters a flower seller in a Bulgarian slum, standing atop a mountain of garbage. Gastmann experiences Europe - sometimes on express trains, sometimes on slow regional trains, sometimes by bus through villages when the tracks end. From Gare de l'Est to Venice, from Trieste to Budapest, from Belgrade to Sofia, until the doors of the Orient open before his eyes. And everywhere he senses the changes of our time. What is the state of our continent, of the European dream?

Dennis Gastmann, born in 1978 in Osnabrück, has traveled to every continent - as a writer, filmmaker, and "guerrilla correspondent" for ARD's international magazines. He journeyed with 80,000 questions around the world, encountered saints and witches, ascetics and oligarchs, and walked across the Alps on foot to atone for his sins (the walk to Canossa). His reportages have won multiple awards and been nominated three times for the Grimme Prize. For the Atlas of Undiscovered Lands, he visited the last unknown places on Earth; for The Second-to-Last Samurai, he explored Japan. Dennis Gastmann lives in Hamburg and works around the world.