Encounters At The End Of The World

Not so many people may have the courage to go all the way south to Antarctica, to make research, to meet people, to experience and to experiment. You must be either a very enthusiastic scientist or you must be nuts. It turns out, as seen in Encounters At The End Of The World, that those scientists are nuts.

Encounters At The End Of The World is a 2007 documentary film by Werner Herzog. The name may suggest some that the movie would be about interesting creatures, animals or organisms of the nature in Antarctica, after all it is certainly a place of mystery and not a place that would easily be seen, however, this is yet a Herzog movie and thus the encounters that is searched for is not the fluffy penguins, as Herzog himself would state, but the dreams of the people living and working there, accompanied by the vast landscape.

The journey begins at McMurdo Station and then goes on to a nearby seal camp, a diving camp, Mount Erebus and to ANITA project base. While the landscape and elements of nature such as volcanos or a group of penguins where one of them goes on to an individual journey leaving the group for a certain death in the barren interior of the continent, the people such as the scientists and workmen are all very interesting characters, closest to madness. One fascinating fact about those people is that apart from the scientific researches and experiments, these are also the people responsible from the basic needs of the population, such as cooking or cleaning etc. It is certainly an impressive way of community life; after all, one should not expect to find there the normalities around us.


Encounters At The End Of The World received very positive reviews from the critics, with the consensus that the film "offers a poignant study of the human psyche amid haunting landscapes". The movie was shot as part of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. The crew consisted only of Herzog, recording the production sound and of cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger. They went to Antarctica without any opportunity to plan filming locations and subjects of interviews and they had only seven weeks to do the whole footage, thus Herzog often met his subjects only minutes before he began interviewing them. Nonetheless, this seems not to have prevented him from having a deep insight to those people.


I had seen Encounters At The End Of The World before I saw Man On Wire, yet another masterpiece that competed for Academy Award for Best Documentary, and I was amazed that it did not receive the award (well, yes, I did change my mind after viewing Man On Wire). You cannot help but get a peaceful state of mind with the beautiful and stimulating landscape as well as get surprised with the somewhat striking states of minds of those people. It certainly is an impressive 99 minutes, worth to watch again and again.