Professional Dreamers (Encounters at the End of the World)

Sydney Film Festival: Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog, USA, 2007)

The obvious thing to say about film festivals is that they take you to places you've probably never been before - from the Maori communities of New Zealand, for example, to the Mennonite villages of Mexico. And who better to take you into the furthest reaches of our world than Werner Herzog, a filmmaker who's always been interested in off-the-wall individuals living off-the-map, from the Amazon of Aguirre to the Alaska of Grizzli Man.

This time Werner heads to Antarctica, a continent so suited to the director's obsessions - particularly nature ability to drive men insane - you wonder why it's taken him so long to shoot in the South Pole. Taking advantage of an invitation by the National Science Foundation and the five months of uninterrupted daylight offered by the Austral summer, he flies to the remote McMurdo research station to meet the locals.

They're a colourful bunch alright. As one of the temporary inhabitants puts it, the South Pole is a magnet for people who have the intention of jumping off the margins of the map, and it does seem like "everybody who's not tied down falls down to the bottom of the planet." We meet a forklift driver with a PhD in philosophy, a scientist who'd rather be a rock musician, a cell-biologist with a fetish for 50's monster movies, a plumber who's really an Aztec prince and a linguist working on a continent with no indigenous languages.

Herzog's trademark sardonic voice over takes us on a freaks tour of Antarctica, from the claustrophobic ugliness of McMurdo (from which he is compelled to flee once he finds out it hosts a regular yoga class), to the centre of an iceberg the size of England, via a survival school where one learns how to outlive a snow storm using the hilarious "buckethead technique".

With a knack for rooting out the eccentrics among us, Herzog asks the scientists (also known here as "professional dreamers") all kinds of unscientific questions. You'll learn that seals sound like Pink Floyd under water, that crack whoring is surprisingly common amongst penguins and that the human race is basically doomed. One tends to forget the documentary is actually produced by otherwise respectable and educational Discovery Channel!

Encounters at the End of the World is an entertaining and frequently side-splitting documentary. The stunning images of the Last Continent more than make up for the terrible soundtrack (Herzog has always had terrible taste in music). Even the coal-mining town ugliness of McMurdo (which sounds like McMurder in Herzog's clipped German accent) has an otherworldly beauty to it. It's a strange and somewhat terrifying preview of what a future space station might look like on another planet.

While Herzog refuses to keep a straight face, he does take Antarctica seriously. Underneath the absurd jokes and irreverent tone lies a potent warning about the folly of men, the fragility of the planet and the sombre truth that our species has an expiry date stamped all over it.

Professional Dreamers (Encounters at the End of the World)