Werner Herzog Treks To Another Land Of Ice In Happy People Trailer

If you love Werner Herzog as much as I love Werner Herzog, then this trailer for his newest film, Happy People: A Year In The Taiga is for you.  If you don’t love Werner Herzog, there’s obviously something wrong with you, because Werner Herzog, as well as being one of the finest filmmakers of our age, is also just awesome.

Being awesome does not necessarily mean that you make great movies – although in this case, it does. The new trailer for Herzog and Dmitry Vasyukov’s documentary Happy People: A Year In The Taiga, about the indigenous people of a remote area of Siberia, is simply stunning.  More adjectives? Beautiful. Transcendent. Epic. COLD. And this is just the trailer.

Happy People: A Year In The Taiga has been making the festival rounds for awhile now, but we’re finally going to get it on the big screen come January 25 – if, of course, you’re lucky enough to live in a city that actually shows these kinds of movies. In many ways, this greatly resembles Herzog’s other forays into documentary, especially Encounters At The End Of The World, which also made me feel really cold.  The photography looks beautiful – as well it should – and the narration typical Herzog. Expect this to be both lyrical and unforgiving.

Official synopses don’t really do justice to documentaries, but here’s the one for this:

Deep in the Siberian wilderness, far away from civilization, 300 people inhabit the small village of Bakhta at the river Yenisei. There are only two ways to reach this outpost: by helicopter or boat. There‘s no telephone, running water or medical aid. The locals, whose daily routines have barely changed over the last centuries, live according to their own values and cultural traditions. With insightful commentary written and narrated by Herzog, Happy People follows one of the Siberian trappers through all four seasons of the year to tell the story of a culture virtually untouched by modernity.

I’m intrigued, but I’m always intrigued by whatever Herzog has to offer.

Happy People comes to select theatres in the US January 25.  Check out the trailer below and let us know what you think!