As with his documentaries, the Munich-born director's life includes fictional-sounding facts, including rodeo riding and walking from Munich to Paris (the subject of his award-winning 1974 book "Of Walking in Ice"). Self-taught Herzog's first short was "Hercules" (melding body builders and a crash). His feature debut, "Signs of Life", made in 1967, is about a group of bored German soldiers on Crete. Successful fiction films in the 1970s followed, many featuring actor Klaus Kinski, like "Aguirre: The Wrath of God" and jungle opera "Fizcarraldo". Herzog focuses on the actor in "My Best Fiend Klaus" (1999), one of three of his documentaries at the festival. The other two films are "Fata Morgana" (1971, a creation myth set in the Sahara) and"Land of Silence and Darkness" (1971, about a blind/deaf woman).

WERNER HERZOG

Werner Herzog, whose real name is Werner H. Stipetic, was born on September 5, 1942 in Munich. He grew up in a remote mountain village in Bavaria, where there was no telephone, no cinema and no television. He started travelling on foot at the age of 14. He made his first phone-call at the age of 17. While attending high school, he also worked the nightshift as a welder in a steel factory in order to raise enough money to make films. He made his first film in 1961, at the age of 19. Since then he has produced, written and directed more than forty films, published more than a dozen books of prose and directed as many operas.