SXSW Film

• SXSW Film

  Daily reviews and interviews

• Marie Losier's Love Story (Within a Love Story)

  BY KATE X MESSER

• He Knew Just the Guy for the Job

  BY JOSH ROSENBLATT

• Our Day Will Come

  BY MARC SAVLOV

• Becoming Santa

  BY NORA ANKRUM

• Detention

  BY CINDY WIDNER

• Caught Inside

  BY RICHARD WHITTAKER

• The FP

  BY RICHARD WHITTAKER

• Otis Under Sky

  BY KATE X MESSER

• Cave of Forgotten Dreams

  BY MARC SAVLOV

• Kumaré

  BY JOE O'CONNELL

• A Bag of Hammers

  BY ANNE HARRIS

• The City Dark

  BY NORA ANKRUM

• Natural Selection

  BY ASHLEY MORENO

• You Instead

  BY MELANIE HAUPT

• A Matter of Taste

  BY MELANIE HAUPT

• Last Days Here

  BY JOSH ROSENBLATT

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Werner Herzog, the poet laureate of extremity, has returned with another lighthearted romp about the inevitability of obsolescence and the strange beauty of human struggle. Picking up where Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World left off, Cave of Forgotten Dreams takes us to one of the far reaches of human experience, the 32,000-year-old paintings discovered on the walls of the Chauvet Cave in France in 1994. The cave, which Herzog calls "one of the greatest discoveries in the history of human culture," is the perfect setting for the director's fatalistic philosophizing: It's light on air and space and heavy with metaphor, art, nature, and death. Like Chauvet itself, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is both beautiful and oppressive; you marvel at the artistry of the paintings covering the cave's walls while at the same time mourning the incomprehensible distance between the people who painted them and ourselves. Score another one for cruel, indifferent nature and for Herzog, its undisputed cinematic champion.

Friday, March 18, 5:30pm, Alamo Lamar B