Beyond The Borders – Werner Herzog Film Cycle & Photo Exhibition

The Metropolis Association and the Goethe-Institut Beirut present “Beyond The Borders”, a film cycle and a photo exhibition from the German filmmaker Werner Herzog.

Werner Herzog, director of the new German cinema, is mainly known for the powerful images of his films, as in “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”, “Nosferatu- phantom of the Night” or “Fitzcarraldo”.

Since the 1960’s, the autodidact director’s reputation as an excellent author film-maker extended beyond the borders of Germany, mainly to the USA. His characters are essentially desperate, lonely rebels, deprived from a language to communicate. They suffer from this deficit as they are aware that their rebellion is doomed to fail. Yet, they keep going and relentlessly pursue their fight, alone and without any support.

Herzog takes up several themes, which stretch through his works like a red thread. In the retrospective, these will be presented in the chapters: Creation and Apocalypse, Beginning and Ending of Speech, Warriors and Offenders, Rise and Fall.

In his documentaries, Herzog is not claiming to be objective. On the contrary, he sometimes even stages his own, subjective point-of-view. Yet, this does not affect his choice of characters: they remain outsiders, secluded, abandoned.