“There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” —Werner Herzog

Endlessly versatile, there are few stones that Werner Herzog has left unturned. With over fifty years of filmmaking behind him, the New German Cinema pioneer has tried it all. Whether roving between documentary and fictional modes, experimenting at the wildest reaches of genre filmmaking, or dreaming up seemingly impossible set-pieces (often in extremely risky scenarios), the visionary filmmaker has never held back from realizing his cinematic dreams. Famously, Herzog’s fictions often demand physically involved performances from a talented cast of actors. Given that his characters might traverse the depths of jungles or the swirling miasma of a desert storm in search of the ineffable. By pushing his actors to mental and physical extremes in the pursuit of indelible images, his collaborations have since become the stuff of cinematic legend and brought out many career-best performances. His documentaries are uniquely filtered through a distinctive world view, one profoundly fascinated by the world’s many wonders and startling inconsistencies. A filmmaker of enduring fascinations, Herzog has tackled the vertiginous descent into madness like few other filmmakers—explored through the figures of lone outsiders or a hypnotized community. Committed to a relentless pursuit of the “ecstatic truth” through art, Herzog’s documentary and fiction films are imbued with an itinerant spirit of curiosity and exploration that pushes at the very limits of human experience. The truth, they say, is always stranger than fiction.