Hans Schomburgk

TRAILER

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The documentary tells the fascinating story of film pioneer Hans Schomburgk, the first filmmaker to capture Africa’s overwhelming beauty on camera. A visually powerful, breathtaking journey through time from the past to the present. Schomburgk’s original films transport viewers to mysterious regions that were still largely unexplored at the time, interwoven with sumptuous shots of today’s Africa to capture the rapid transformation of an entire continent—while also preserving its indestructible beauty.

For the first time, the film is dedicated to the life and work of Hans Schomburgk—who was the first to travel the Black Continent with a film camera and who, out of a love of nature and people, evolved from adventurer and big-game hunter into a filmmaker, exchanging his rifle for a camera. Using original footage, the documentary brings the pioneering filmmaker’s significant life’s work back to light and, 100 years later, embarks on a cinematographic search for traces of Schomburgk’s Africa, with breathtaking images in a breathtaking landscape. An epic and also philosophical exploration of what remains of the last great mysteries Schomburgk once discovered. Through Schomburgk’s eyes, we turn the pages of half a century of African history and, with striking images, search for evidence of an exciting past.

The Hamburg native shot the first films on African soil in 1913/1914. For the first time, he presented African ways of life to a broad European audience, including its unique flora and fauna.

With his footage from the former French, German and British colonies, the film pioneer shaped his contemporaries’ image of Africa. His films transported audiences into a mysterious world that was gradually disappearing. Long before Bernhard Grzimek, Heinz Sielmann or Jaques Perrin, Schomburgk showed viewers Africa’s animal and plant life in their natural habitats, as well as the people of Africa, who still seemed scarcely influenced by Western civilisation. For almost 50 years, he documented the rapid changes on the continent with his camera. Disappointed by the destruction of the worlds he had once encountered, in 1958 he bid his beloved continent farewell forever with “My Farewell to Africa”. From then on, his “paradise” can only be entered through his films.