Part of Science on Screen® and Doc Spotlight

Pieced together from Timothy Treadwell’s actual video footage, Werner Herzog’s remarkable documentary examines the calling that drove Treadwell to live among a tribe of wild grizzly bears on an Alaskan reserve. A devoted conservationist with a passion for adventure, Timothy believed he had bridged the gap between human and beast. When one of the bears he loved and protected tragically turns on him, the footage he shot serves as a window into our understanding of nature and its grim realities.

“Werner Herzog has made a brilliant documentary about an American saint and fool — a man who understands everything about nature except death… In a way, GRIZZLY MAN is the ultimate nature documentary, for it chronicles the nature of man as well as the nature of animals.” —David Denby, New Yorker (Jul 31, 2005) 

“A brilliant portrait of adventure, activism, obsession and potential madness… In making GRIZZLY MAN, Herzog has opened a kind of portal through which he can talk to, and even argue with, Treadwell across time and space. Certain questions remain unanswerable, which is likely just as Herzog would have it.” —Scott Foundas, Variety (Jan 26, 2005)

“A small masterpiece of a documentary that takes us into the heart of a complex darkness… Though Herzog pays tribute to Treadwell as a filmmaker, his film is anything but a hagiography. There is a powerful argument running through the movie, an ideological clash between Treadwell's environmental harmonizing and Herzog's view of the universe as an eternal catastrophe of destruction and chaos.” —Desson Thomson, Washington Post (Aug 12, 2005)