From the BZ editorial team
Berlin, midsummer 2049: The temperatures are almost inhumanly high, a new health care reform is dividing society and making solidarity between people disappear. The Charité is still the stronghold of medical research – this is how the ARD looks to the future.
Unlike usual, the new season of the successful series of ARD in cooperation with ARTE does not focus on a historical context, but on the future. Filming for the six episodes of Season 4, directed by Esther Bialas, recently started in Lisbon.
The cast of the now entirely fictional characters includes Sesede Terziyan, Angelina Häntsch, Gina Haller, Timur Isik, Adriana Altaras, Moritz Führmann, Joshua Seelenbinder and Jan-Gregor Kremp.
Johanna Kraus, Head of Fiction MDR: “The starting point for this new season was the question of what someone will receive the Nobel Prize for in medical research in the future? To our surprise, the answer is linked to the beginning of the first season of ‘Charité’: Robert Koch found a bacillus as a pathogen, now Maral Safadi is working with the interplay of all bacteria in the human organism.”
What is the new season about?
Researcher Maral Safadi (Sesede Terziyan) returns from Boston to her old place of work with her wife, the gynecologist Julia Kowalczyk (Angelina Häntsch): From now on she heads the Institute for Microbiology at the Berlin Charité. Her very first case confronts her with an unknown bacterium…
And: In the year 2049 there will be a health care reform: Health insurance companies will create a score for every person, collect data on health and life expectancy, which will form the basis for treatment. Society is splitting up and there are also supporters and opponents of the reform at the Charité.
Maral Safadi’s mother Seda (Adriana Altaras), a surgeon at the clinic, wants to fight against the injustice of the new health care reform and secretly founds a “shadow clinic” where patients with bad scores can also be treated.
Shooting will take place in Portugal until mid-April. The broadcast date in the first and ARTE is planned for 2024.