Nadine Pungs & Lutz Jäkel

Cheerful, serious and touching stories that don't appear in the news.

Writer Nadine Pungs and photojournalist Lutz Jäkel have been traveling to the shining countries of the Arabian Peninsula for many years. A region that is characterized by negative headlines and clichés. In their multi-award-winning live reportage, Pungs and Jäkel dispel these stereotypes and tell of desert woe and climate change, of warmth and destruction, of growth and decay.

The two travelers were always on the road separately because they knew nothing about each other. When Lutz Jäkel marveled at the temple tombs of the rock city of Petra in Jordan, Nadine Pungs followed in the footsteps of a famous Orient traveler. While Jäkel conducted interviews with successful businesswomen in the United Arab Emirates, Pungs spoke to migrant workers in Kuwait about precarious living conditions. In Bahrain, they experienced the sinful nightlife. Pungs explored Saudi Arabia on his own for several months and met a prince, while Jäkel lived in Yemen long before the war and drove through the desert with drug traffickers. Pungs just stood at the border in Oman and looked into the country.

One day, they decide to set off together to one of the most exciting countries in the Middle East, a place they have never been to before: Iraq, the former Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization. But also a country that has suffered decades of dictatorship, wars and conflicts. Together they visit magnificent Shiite shrines, talk to young Iraqis about their future, pass around forty military checkpoints and watch the sun sink into the Tigris.

In the end, Nadine Pungs and Lutz Jäkel have collected cheerful and touching stories and photographs from all the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, stories that do not appear in the news. Because in the West, we know almost nothing about the tens of millions of people who live, dance, laugh, argue and love on the peninsula.

Yalla Yalla - Arabic for: Let's go! Infotainment at its best.

Nadine Pungs is a writer. She studied literature and history in Düsseldorf. Before, during and after that, she toured the country as a cabaret artist, performed in the theater, organized comedy shows and earned her living with a number of part-time jobs. She has been traveling the globe for many years now, collecting stories, processing them into literature and telling them as a storyteller on stage.

Lutz Jäkel is a photojournalist, author, storyteller and speaker. He studied Islamic Studies and History in Hamburg and lived for some time in Damascus (Syria) and Sanaa (Yemen). Having grown up in Istanbul, he has been traveling and photographing the world and writing about it for many years. His work has won numerous awards and he is represented by the renowned photo agency laif. His photos and reportages appear in books, magazines and newspapers, for example in Stern, Spiegel, National Geographic, Spiegel Online, GEO, Süddeutsche Zeitung and the FAZ. Lutz can also be seen in TV formats on WDR, ZDF, 3sat, Deutsche Welle TV and others. Most recently, he (together with Lamya Kaddor) published the award-winning illustrated book "Syrien. A country without war" was published by Piper Verlag.