Werner Herzog, the is a German film director, screenwriter, author, actor, and opera director in a message hailed the 14th Iran International Documentary Film Festival known as “Cinema Verite” is slated to be held totally online on December 15-22 in Tehran.
In a message to the “Cinema Verite”, a figure of the "New German Cinema", Herzog stressed that: "I love Iran."
In his message, the globally-known filmmaker described Iran as a country which a 5,000-year-old tradition of poetry.
He added that Iran enjoys very great filmmakers, expressing hope that he could travel to Iran in near future in person.
"I have always preached “Cinema Verite”. Truth lies beyond the sheer facts, lies somewhere in a mysterious area that cannot really be defined," he added.
Herzog said the Iranian films have found something which illuminates us.
He also wished the best of luck for the Cinema Verite.
His films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with unique talents in obscure fields, or individuals who are in conflict with nature.
Born 5 September 1942, Herzog started work on his first film Herakles in 1961, when he was nineteen. Since then he has produced, written, and directed more than sixty feature films and documentaries, such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Heart of Glass (1976), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), Cobra Verde (1987) Lessons of Darkness (1992), Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), My Best Fiend (1999), Invincible (2000), Grizzly Man (2005), Encounters at the End of the World (2007), Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010).
He has published more than a dozen books of prose and directed as many operas.
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.
Herzog's films have received considerable critical acclaim and achieved popularity on the art house circuit. They have also been the subject of controversy in regard to their themes and messages, especially the circumstances surrounding their creation.
A notable example is Fitzcarraldo, in which the obsessiveness of the central character was reflected by the director during the making of the film.
The burden of Dreams, a documentary filmed during the making of Fitzcarraldo, explored Herzog's efforts to make the film in harsh conditions. Herzog's diaries during the making of Fitzcarraldo were published as Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo.
Mark Harris of The New York Times wrote in his review: "The movie and its making are both fables of daft aspiration, investigations of the blurry border between having a dream and losing one's mind."
His treatment of subjects has been characterized as Wagnerian in its scope. The plot of Fitzcarraldo is based on the building of an opera house and his later film Invincible (2001) touches on the character of Siegfried.[48] He is proud of never using storyboards and often improvising large parts of the script. He explains this technique in the commentary track to Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
FA/PR