Grizzly Man

by Werner Herzog
103’, USA, 2005

Timothy Treadwell spent thirteen summers, from 1990 to 2003, in the Alaskan mountains living with grizzly bears until he was killed, torn apart, and devoured by one of them. In the fi nal three years of this coexistence, Treadwell took a video camera with him and shot some 100 hours of footage. He not only filmed the bears, but also sat in front of the camera and told his own story: his obsession with protecting these creatures from poachers, his relationship with them, with Nature, and with the world. Treadwell was convinced that he had become the bears’ friend, if not one of them, or like them. In 2003, one of these friends savaged him and his companion, Amie Huguenard, who was with him that summer. Only the microphone of the video camera was witness to this foreseeable tragedy. Th e voice of Werner Herzog narrates the entire film and provides a commentary for this heartbreaking audio epilogue, and the death of Treadwell, as he had commentated his life with the bears and his vision of  Nature as only “chaos, confl ict, and death”.

Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog was born Werner Stipetic´ in Munich in 1942, and grew up with his mother in a small village in the Bavarian mountains. He did not see a single fi lm during his childhood,  but began travelling — alone and on foot — at the age of fourteen, and worked as a welder in a steel factory, studied history, literature, and theatre before making his fi rst fi lm at nineteen. Since that time he has written and directed more than fi fty fi lms and documentaries that place him amongst the most important living directors.