Fata Morgana

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• 1971
• 1 hr 19 mins
• Documentary, Drama

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Initially Fata Morgana was to be an African science fiction film, shot in Algerian Sahara. On arrival there is still Africa and Algeria, but it is no longer fiction or documentary. Fata Morgana is a kind of experimental epic poem in three parts: Creation, Paradise, and The Golden Age. A quasi-animist film which aims for trance and ecstasy through a shamanic collage of images, texts and music. Werner Herzog defined it as the first awakening and the first astonishment. An extraordinary experience, poetic and powerful but also deeply personal. Herzog underlines this in a conversation led by Michel Ciment for the magazine Positif (n°169): "The origin of Fata Morgana initially had a story close to science fiction. The first day of filming, I threw the script and I only kept the visions, this new perception of our world. I made the film like in a dream, when I was sleeping in the desert, I didn't know what I would shoot the next day. It was like a hallucination. I thought that Fata Morgana was so fragile, so close to what I felt deeply, that I didn't dare show it to my best friends and I had kept it a secret for a year. and a half before it was snatched from my hands for the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.