Our original winning format returns with three brand new episodes- City, Country, River! Breathtaking aerial images combined with striking animations from satellite and GPS data. The legendary New Zealand cinematographer Peter Thompson has once again joined award-winning directors Petra Höfer and Freddie Röckenhaus to create this visually stunning flight over Germany.

The third season of “Germany From Above“ makes, as usual, very few intermediate stops. Seen from above, viewers discover a new and magical perspective of a country they may have thought they knew, but discovered much more.

When bakers switch on the lights of their bakeries, the pattern of where Germans live becomes visible from space: the great cities line the Rhine and Ruhr; Hamburg and Bremen glitter along the northern coast; Berlin anchors the east, Munich and Stuttgart the south. Looking at this carpet of light spreading across towns large and small, it becomes clear that cities grew from a simple purpose — to sustain people. This is where markets were held to trade the goods of the surrounding land, and where tolls were collected on the great routes of commerce.

Looking down from a helicopter, one thing stands out: surprisingly many German cities have preserved the structure and buildings of their prosperous past — or carefully rebuilt them. Landshut on the river Isar, for instance, was once far more significant on the world stage than Munich. The rise and fall of cities across the centuries can be read particularly well from above, in their architecture and the growth rings they have left behind.

“Germany From Above 3” surveys the fortunes and struggles of German cities from the air: From Frankfurt, which owes its enduring success to its geographical location, to Düsseldorf, which rose to prominence as the ‘writing desk of the Ruhr’, to Hanover, which gathered its destroyed historic buildings after the war and rebuilt them together in a single block. To Aachen, where German kings were crowned, to Cologne — which today still clusters around its famous cathedral, and was in the early Middle Ages, with 30,000 inhabitants, the largest city in the Holy Roman Empire.

When viewed from above, the last two coal mines, and last steel plant in the Ruhr, or the chemical giant BASF in Ludwigshafen, or the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg, you can feel the sheer power of Germany’s industrial cities — and understand why they never became administrative centres.”

Filming from above in Leipzig, Stuttgart or Munich, you immediately grasp the importance of the railway in shaping these cities: stations and tracks still occupy vast areas of the inner city. Or have become vital arteries into the cities, like the famous suspension railway in Wuppertal.