Grizzly Man

Grizzly Man (2005) is Werner Herzog's documentary, available to watch online on iFILM. For thirteen summers Timothy Treadwell camped among Alaska's wild bears, filming them up close with no weapon and no fence between them.

In the fall of 2003 a bear killed Treadwell and his companion Amie Huguenard. Herzog cut the film from over a hundred hours of footage Timothy shot himself: he talks to the grizzlies like friends, gives them names, rants at park officials, weeps with joy over a fox. The director refuses to crown him a hero or write him off as a lunatic. Instead Herzog argues with his subject in voiceover, in his own voice, and that tension is the whole movie. An audio recording of the final minutes exists, but he pointedly declines to let us hear it.

It stands among the most talked-about documentaries of its decade, and a rare one where the filmmaker flatly states that nature isn't kind or cruel, just indifferent. Harsh, sad and, in stretches, genuinely funny, it's a portrait of a man who mistook love for a boundary. Stream Grizzly Man (2005) online on iFILM.