The guardians of biodiversity

Description

The government is enacting programmes to protect it, the UN is proclaiming a decade of the same name and scientists are warning against underestimating the importance of biodiversity. Today, the owners of well-tended ornamental lawns and gravel gardens are often pilloried. Citizens' initiatives oppose the construction of new roads and industrial areas and even wind turbines or other green energy producers. And industrial agriculture is under constant fire from public criticism.

In "Passion for nature: The guardians of biodiversity", Jan and Melanie Haft and their team set out to visit experts in the field. Portraying them with their cameras and all kinds of special equipment. Using time-lapse, slow-motion and much more, the biodiversity in those places they visit is made visible. In casual conversation Jan and Melanie talk to people who have dedicated their entire work to the protection of biodiversity and who can tell us why and where the most animals and plants exist. And why this diversity is so important for our human lives. They elicit personal and emotional insights from them: From the director of the Berchtesgaden National Park, Roland Baier, who is looking for a special butterfly, to the aquatic ecologist Gerald Zauner, who is revitalising a section of the Danube in Upper Austria. From the farmer from Thuringia, Gerd Frickel, who is dedicated to the preservation of wild herbs, to Stella Schmigalle and Laura Grosser, who are looking after the "Wild Pasture Alperstedter Ried", north of Erfurt.

On a former military training ground in Brandenburg, which is reminiscent of a wilderness in Africa, Jan and Melanie talk to the local nature conservation leader Hannes Petrischak and finally, back in Upper Bavaria, they meet a guardian of biodiversity who looks after a particularly small area: the natural-garden planner Ingrid Völker is the owner of a natural garden herself, where she created a tiny paradise of biodiversity, a place where the rare beewolf and swallowtails are common.

The film lives from the thoughts and conversations with the people whose passion is to save biodiversity.