Little Dieter Needs to Fly

Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) is a Werner Herzog documentary you can watch online on iFILM. It follows Dieter Dengler, a German boy obsessed with flight who emigrated to the United States and ended up in a navy cockpit. On an early mission his plane went down over the jungles of Laos, and he was taken prisoner deep in the war.

More than thirty years on, Dengler walks those same trails again with Herzog at his side. He recounts the months of captivity, the starvation that dropped him to barely eighty-five pounds, the fellow prisoners he bonded with, and a breakout through the rainforest few men would have attempted. Herzog pushes past the standard interview, talking his subject into re-staging the tortures with help from local villagers, until the line between testimony and reenactment dissolves on purpose.

This is Herzog at his most intimate, drawn to a man whose hunger for the sky survived everything done to him. Years later the director reworked the story as the feature Rescue Dawn with Christian Bale. One for viewers who love documentaries about obsession and raw survival. Stream Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) online on iFILM.