In most films, people die so easily. Few films really explore somebody who should have died, but didn't. I'm not talking about Bruce Willis and a machine gun defying the odds, but stories people who by some strange luck tumble through the cruelest of suffering and come out alive. They recover, get a job, buy a home and maybe live on your block. That's Dieter Dengler.
Little Dieter Needs to Fly is about a man we could pass everyday. Dengler is so dynamic and yet strangely disconnected. He begins telling his story of brutal torture, starvation and escape from a POW camp like he's describing a Christmas that went south. Werner Herzog begins a dance with Dengler, taking him back into the physical settings of his story, having Dengler tell it within grass huts surrounded by Vietnamese men holding AK-47s. Dengler's stories become more real, his emotions start to emerge and memories which would be considered innappropriate in most conversations come out naturally. The memories flow into a beautiful documentary that puts you in a place of simple wonder about death and our relationship to it. Something that feels inappropriate to talk about in most of our conversations.