Encounters... Penguins Gone Wild and Life in Antartica

“Is their such a thing as insanity among penguins?” Herzog asks a scientist who has been studying the colony for decades. Encounters at the End of the World, a film by Werner Herzog, set in frigid Antartica may seem just another Discovery Channel documentary on global warming, but it goes deeper by examining the odd assortment of people who inhabit this remote continent.

One thing that struck me is that Antartica attracts a particular breed of settlers the same way Ernest Shackleton hand-picked his crew a century ago. From scientists, philosophers, phycisists, zoologist, volcanologist, glaciologist to a former banker, linguist, a woman who “traveled from Ecuador to Lima, Peru, in a sewer pipe”, a plumber whose ring fingers marks his “royal Inca/Aztec heritage” and music producer Henry Kaiser whose under-ice-covered-water footage inspired the film, you meet them all.

Herzog aims to find out if penguins are crazy, but your close encounters with the subjects of this documentary lead you to wonder if the crew that went along with Shackleton went there because he picked them, or because they were just drawn to place the same way this unusual collection of folks ended up there today.

Watch trailer here.