NATURE . WILDLIFE

American Amazon

2 × 52' (ENG, GER)

This is a journey into the last secret wilderness in North America.

An ancient bastion of life anchored in place by two-thousand-year-old cypress trees. A labyrinth of flooded forests and pulsing arteries. A place buzzing with new stories: from the mass migration of the world’s only social raptor, the swallow-tailed kite, to the dazzling spectacle of the ghost orchid and its surprising nocturnal pollinators. A world where big mysteries still tread around every corner of the swamp: the cryptic behaviour of the American black bear, the silent footsteps of the Florida panther. Tales bubbling up from crystalline springs and emerging out of serpentine blackwater rivers: the playful chatter of river otters, the heavy splashes of Gulf sturgeon, and the deep bellows of the American alligator. Here, in the wet and wild American South, among the last stands of cypress, tupelo, strap ferns, pitcher plants, and epiphytes, is what E.O. Wilson called “America’s Amazon” – a hotspot of biodiversity rivaling anywhere on Earth – and yet somehow its story has never been told.