Encounters at the End of the World

Encounters at the End of the World
USA, 2007,  99’
in English w/ Arm. subtitles

Director and Scriptwriter: Werner Herzog
Cinematographer: Peter Zeitllinger
Producers: Henry Kaiser, Erik Nelson, Phil Fairclough, Dave Harding, Julian Hobbs, Andrea Meditch
Editor: Joe Bini
Music: Henry Kaiser, David Lindley
Production Company: Discovery Films

Filmmaker Werner Herzog and cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger travel to Antarctica to meet the people who live and work there and to capture footage of the continent’s unique locations. Via narration, Herzog explains that this film will not be a typical Antarctica film about “fluffy penguins”, but will, instead, explore the dreams of the people and the landscape. Herzog manages to show the audience things that it would otherwise never have seen.

Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog (born 5 September 1942) is a German film director, screenwriter, author, actor, and opera director, regarded as a pioneer of New German Cinema. His films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams or individuals in conflict with nature. He is known for his unique filmmaking process, such as disregarding storyboards, emphasizing improvisation, and placing the cast and crew into similar situations as characters in his films.

French filmmaker François Truffaut once called Herzog “the most important film director alive”. American film critic Roger Ebert said that Herzog “has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons, or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular.” He was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine in 2009.