The Land of Silence and Darkness

Werner Herzog made an impressive portrait of the then 56-year-old Fini Straubinger, a deaf-and-blind woman from the German federal state of Bavaria, who helps people sharing her handicaps to avoid becoming socially isolated. As in his later feature film JEDER FÜR SICH UND GOTT GEGEN ALLE (1974), based on the mysterious story of Kaspar Hauser, Herzog tries to show, without passing a moral judgement, that people with a handicap or ‘defect’ are not pitiful or ‘inferior’; on the contrary, something in their way of life poses the question to us, ‘normal’ people, of who we are and why we do what we do.