Werner Herzog

Channel BBC Two
Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin (21 Sept 2019) When legendary writer and adventurer Bruce Chatwin was dying of Aids, his friend and collaborator Werner Herzog made a final visit to say farewell. As a parting gift, Chatwin gave Herzog the rucksack that had accompanied him around the world.
Thirty years later, carrying the rucksack, Herzog sets out on his own journey, inspired by Chatwin’s passion for the nomadic life. Along the way, Herzog uncovers stories of lost tribes, wanderers and dreamers.
He travels to South America, where Chatwin wrote In Patagonia, the book that turned him into a literary sensation, with its enigmatic tales of dinosaurs, myths and journeys to the ends of the world. Read More »

Werner Herzog and Andre Singer’s riveting documentary, filled with unforgettable archive materials and based on three never before seen interviews, provides incredible access to arguably the world’s greatest living politician.

Now 88 and battling illness, the visionary Mikhail Gorbachev, the former General Secretary of the U.S.S.R., is still gently but resolutely pushing towards his goals. Herzog celebrates Gorbachev’s three remarkable accomplishments: negotiations with the U.S. to reduce nuclear weapons, cessation of Soviet control of Eastern Europe and the reunification of Germany, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc. All of this in six years!Read More »

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Werner Herzog’s third feature is a haunting, sardonic exploration of Africa as it was “in the beginning,” and as it becomes glutted with the wastes of technological civilization. Amos Vogel writes of the film: “Marvelous, sensual, 360-degree travelling shots of animal cadavers, barbed wire, industrial wastes, decaying trucks, sudden oil wells, ominous surrealist tableaux — all embedded in tragically alienated landscapes of sand and disassociated natives — create an obsessional, hypnotic statement whose anti-technological, anti-totalitarian, cruelly anti-sentimental humanism is subtle, overpowering, and inexplicable to shallow Left and know-nothing Right.”Read More »

This film shows the disaster of the Kuwaitian oil fields in flames. In contrast to the common documentary film there are no comments and few interviews. What must have been the hell itself is presented to the viewer in such beautiful sights and beautiful music that one has to be fascinated by it.Read More »

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Shows an independent group of physicians in remote areas of East Africa, and the difficulties they encounter in treating the African patients, who prefer local traditional remedies.Read More »

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Idi Amin Dada was not the only leader of a newly independent African nation who was accused (on the basis of reliable evidence) of bizarre practices. The former French colony known as the Central African Republic was governed from 1966 to 1977 by a man known as Jean Bedel Bokassa. After he was deposed, he was accused of cannibalism. This documentary by Werner Herzog explores the years of his increasingly strange and paranoid rule of that country, and features an interview with a western journalist who was imprisoned by Bokassa as a result of a garbled telex. Bokassa was ousted shortly after he staged an elaborate, widely publicized and very expensive coronation for himself as the “Emperor” of the Republic, during a state visit to another African country.Read More »

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The police are called to a murder scene and quickly discover that the murderer, the victim’s son, is holed up in his house with two hostages. Through a series of interviews with both the murderer’s fiancée and his theatre director the police piece together a picture of a man losing touch with reality.Read More »

A devastating and heartrending take on grizzly bear activists Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard, who were killed in October of 2003 while living among grizzlies in Alaska.Read More »

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This moving documentary by director Werner Herzog enters into the world of Fini Strabinger of Bavaria, who is both deaf and blind. Fini has made a career of helping others who are similarly afflicted, teaching them sign language and taking them on field trips to gardens and touching zoos. Told in an unaffected, homey style, this film uses a minimum of narration as it movingly explores the lives of these people. One of the film’s highlights is footage showing Fini’s reactions to her first airplane flight.Read More »