“Oh oh, this feels a little bit too close to home,” Dieter Dengler says into the camera when a few young Lao men tie up his hands again in the country of his torturers. Herzog sends his protagonist, who was shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War and spent six months in prison under inhuman conditions, on a psycho trip of a different kind. The film became a strategic model for working with re-enactments, for example in “The Act of Killing” (2012) by Joshua Oppenheimer, co-produced by Herzog. Herzog himself re-made the material into a feature film starring Christian Bale.

Kristina Jaspers