Little Dieter Needs to Fly

In 1966, Dieter Dengler was shot down over Laos, captured, and, down to 85 pounds, escaped. Barefoot, surviving monsoons, leeches, and machete-wielding villagers, he was rescued. Now, near 60, living on Mt. Tamalpais, Dengler tells his story: a German lad surviving Allied bombings in World War II, postwar poverty, apprenticed to a smith, beaten regularly. At 18, he emigrates and peels potatoes in the U.S. Air Force. He leaves for California and college, then enlists in the Navy to learn to fly. A quiet man of sorrows tells his story: war, capture, harrowing conditions, escape, and miraculous rescue. Where did he find the strength; how does he now live with his memories?

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Director	Werner Herzog
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Werner Herzog's stories have always had an obsessive focus on the heroic lives of eccentric and unusual people. Flight—human’s defiance of gravity—has always been a rich motif in his films and one of the clearest metaphors for his work. For Herzog, art is more real than life, and the camera should never fly low. It’s only natural that he blurs the lines between fiction and documentary, and Little Dieter Needs to Fly is no exception. Herzog staged and recreated with simple very means Dieter Dengler’s memories; he invented meaningful motifs and suggested images to his subject that reinforced the emotional effectiveness and narrative values of the true story, without adulterating the crucial facts. Here, archives and fabrication, documents and re-enacted scenes all share space without contradiction. After all, art serves to transform someone else’s experience into our own.

Federico Rossin
Cinema historian, independent programmer