Götz Dieter Plage

Götz Dieter Plage ( born May 14, 1936 in Beelitz, † April 3, 1993 in Sumatra ) was a German nature filmmaker, who owned high reputation both nationally and internationally.

Life

Plage 1972 internationally known when he filmed with his colleagues Iain Douglas-Hamilton and Lee Lyon a rampaging elephant in Manyara, Tanzania and thereby escaped narrowly with their lives, as the elephant wanted to knock down him. In the following years he worked for well-known wildlife filmmaker as Bernhard Grzimek, Heinz Sielmann or Alan Root. His recordings were mostly under perilous circumstances, as in a film from the Congo, where he was filming in the area of the Virunga Volcanoes gorilla babies and it was attacked by an angry gorilla man. Many of Plages documentaries were broadcast in the series Adventure Wilderness (ARD), Survival (ITV Network) and Built For The Kill ( National Geographic Channel ) shown and are award-winning. Especially for Survival Anglia he turned almost 20 years successful wildlife documentaries, such as Gorilla ( 1974), Among the Elephants (1975) Orangutan Orphans of the Forest (1976 ), The Leopard That Changed Its Spots (1979) and Cold on the equator ( 1988). His last finished film was The Secret World of Bats, who had in the U.S. premiere in 1992. In April 1993, an experiment on the canopy of Indonesia cost him life. With a miniature airship prototypes he flew over the jungles of Sumatra and wanted to film animals. When trying to retrieve a camera that had become entangled in the branches, he fell from the airship and was killed. This tragic event is a central theme of the documentary The White Diamond by Werner Herzog in 2004, the Duke turned together with Graham Dorrington in Guyana.