CriterionCast

Werner Herzog’s Into The Abyss Picked Up By IFC’s Sundance Selects

It’s a good day to be a Criterion fan.   Well, possibly.

Sundance Selects has announced that they have picked up the rights to Werner Herzog’s upcoming film, Into The Abyss.   The company, a part of IFC, has the rights to Herzog’s last film, Cave Of Forgotten Dreams, a long rumored Criterion Collection release.   This is definitely one hell of a story for fans of both Herzog and Criterion.

The film follows the story of various death row inmates, and features Herzog’s patented style of both filmmaking and his sense of on screen philosophizing.  With an impending debut at this year’s Toronto Film Festival, news surrounding this project will definitely be white hot over the next few weeks, and here’s to hoping that this may also one day be a Criterion Collection release.   Herzog is an amazing filmmaker, and one that deserves as much coverage in the Criterion Collection as humanly possible.   Toss in the fact that IFC is behind it, and you have a film that should be high on Criterion’s list of possible additions.



What do you think?

Source IndieWire

Check out some images from the film, here.


From Sundance Selects:

In his fascinating exploration of a triple homicide case in Conroe, Texas, master filmmaker Werner Herzog (CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, GRIZZLY MAN) probes the human psyche to explore why people kill’”and why a state kills. In intimate conversations with those involved, including 28-year-old death row inmate Michael Perry (scheduled to die within eight days of appearing on- screen), Herzog achieves what he describes as ‘a gaze into the abyss of the human soul.’ Herzog’s inquiries also extend to the families of the victims and perpetrators as well as a state executioner and pastor who’ve been with death row prisoners as they’ve taken their final breaths. As he’s so often done before, Herzog’s investigation unveils layers of humanity, making an enlightening trip out of ominous territory.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

I am not an advocate of the death penalty. I do not even have an argument; I only have a story, the history of the barbarism of Nazi Germany.
There were thousands and thousands of cases of capital punishment; there was a systematic program of euthanasia, and on top of it the industrialized extermination of six million Jews in a genocide that has no precedence in human history.
The argument that innocent men and women have been executed is, in my opinion, only a secondary one. A State should not be allowed – under any circumstance – to execute anyone for any reason. End of story.

– Werner Herzog

Joshua Brunsting

Josh is a critic, a member of the Online Film Critics Society, a wrestling nerd, a hip-hop head, a father, a cinephile and a man looking to make his stamp on the world, one word at a time.