The Okavango in Southern Africa is one of the greatest rivers on Earth – and it is truly unique. It starts in the mountains of Angola, but doesn’t run to the Atlantic Ocean – instead, it flows inland through Botswana before disappearing in the Kalahari desert, where the water either evaporates up to the sky, or sips deep down into the ground.

The four-part series follows the very different stages of the Okavango, as this river creates an incredibly complex ecosystem where the lives of all creatures that live in, along, and around it, are connected and intertwined.

The Okavango, like all wild eco-systems, thrives on change, and everything is interacting with everything else. Lions chase elephants, who chase hippos, who chase crocodiles, who chase catfish, who chase insects driven up the grass stalks by rising waters, etc. pp.
These ‘circles of life’ are the real stories that tell the larger story of this river. It is the connecting tissue of stories, and the stories are just examples of the characters who make up this river.

The series is based on the basic premise that “Someone’s paradise is someone else’s hell.” And it is. A lioness hunts into the swamp and turns a lechwe’s life into hell, as her baby is killed - but the lioness carries this kill back to her own cubs, this way saving their lives.

The story structure borrows its themes from two classics: Tolkien’s idea of three Earths is reflected in the changing characters of the river, with an Upper Okavango, a Middle world and the Lower Okavango, which in turn echo the themes of Dante’s Paradise Lost, as the series’ ‘chapters’ are referencing to Paradise, Limbo and Inferno.